In July of 2017, doctors in Beijing blasted the patient with chemicals and radiation to wipe out his bone marrow, making space for millions of stem cells they then pumped into his body through an IV. These new stem cells, donated by a healthy fellow countryman, would replace the patient’s unhealthy ones, hopefully resolving his cancer. But unlike any other routine bone marrow transplant, this time researchers edited those stem cells with Crispr to cripple a gene called CCR5, without which HIV can’t infiltrate immune cells.
For the first time, a patient got treated for HIV and cancer at the same time, with an infusion of gene-edited stem cells. The results? Mixed.
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