First U.S. Patients Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing Trials Get Underway
https://singularityhub.com/2019/05/02/crispr-used-in-human-trials-for-the-first-time-in-the-us/amp/ CRISPR just hit another landmark. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) confirmed that they have treated two cancer patients using the gene editing darling married with another biomedical wizard, CAR-T . For now, it’s too early to tell if the treatment proved beneficial in either patient, but the team hopes to release a first batch of results in a conference or journal “ at an appropriate time .” It marks CRISPR’s first debut onto the US clinical scene, and it’s a long time coming. As early as mid-2016 the team had already received approval from the FDA to move ahead with their concept. Yet they didn’t register the trial until early 2018 , taking careful precautions to not royally mess up CRISPR’s introduction into the biomedical mainstream. This is in stark contrast to China, which, due to laxer clinical registration rules, kicked off its first CRISPR-for-ca