Sickle Cell Disease: Could CRISPR’s Gene Therapy Editing Tech be the First Cure for It?

The notorious Sickle Cell disease may soon have a potential cure to the illness that it brings to humans, and it is through gene therapy that researchers are looking into now. CRISPR's Gene Editing technology with the Cas9 method has been applied to try and fight against sickle cell, something which the researchers have considered to show great promise.

CRISPR technology has been extremely helpful in a lot of cases with regards to detecting disease, monitoring its spread, or even killing it and eradicating it off the body. There have been several attempts where CRISPR has been used to cure HIV and Leukemia, two of the most notorious killers in disease history.

Sickle Cell Disease Gene Therapy with CRISPR

According to Texarkana Gazette's report (via New York Times), a teenager with sickle cell disease has been successfully declared to be "cured" of the disease by doctors in 2019. The teenager underwent an experimental gene therapy used by a hospital to cure sickle cell and remove it from the body all-in-all.

The experimental gene therapy has focused on the way to remove the disease without the need for invasive surgery or the use of medicine that could also be fatal to the patient. There have been a lot of procedures that focused on gene editing or gene engineering, as it provides a promising result after the treatment.

According to Nature, specific gene therapy methods done by different doctors or hospitals are "closing in" on a cure for sickle cell, and one of them is the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology. Sickle cell is known for its molecular cause, something which has given researchers and scholars a hard time in progressing and finding a cure.

CRISPR Technology

CRISPR Technology is a popular name in the health tech industry, particularly because it tackles genome editing and treatment, which is promising on certain diseases and illnesses.

The promising treatment has been envisioned to try and tackle different diseases and problems that cannot be answered or fixed by certain procedures widely available.

The gene-editing technology is extremely popular as it aims to bring a cutting-edge approach to certain diseases, and it tackles the "hard to reach" areas of medicine like genes or cells.

What is Sickle Cell Disease?

Red blood cells are known to be "disc" shaped cells in the body, and people infected with Sickle Cell disease affect its composition and shape into a crescent or "sickle." What this means is that the body cannot produce the right amount of hemoglobin for the RBCs, thus affecting circulation and oxygen distribution.

It affects a lot of bodily functions, and damage organs severely, that can lead to a person's body failing before them.

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Written by Isaiah Richard