Charlie Gard Post-Mortem: Could He Have Been Saved?

Charlie Gard would have turned one year old last week.

Two days before the British infant died of a mitochondrial disease on July 28, a short article in MIT Technology Review teased that Shoukhrat Mtalipov and his team at Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues had used CRISPR-Cas9 to replace a mutation in human embryos, a titillating heads-up that didn�t actually name the gene or disease.

A week later, Nature published details of what the researchers call gene correction, not editing, because it uses natural DNA repair. I covered the news conference, with a bit of perspective, for Genetic Literacy Project and Medscape Medical News .

Might gene editing enable Charlie�s parents, who might themselves develop mild symptoms as they age, to have another child free of the family�s disease? Could anything have saved the baby?
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Published on August 04, 2017 21:00
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