closer look
Another twist in the CRISPR patent tale
Adobe
You could say George Church called it. Yesterday marked another chapter in how the patent-right story has evolved around the revolutionary genome editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. Vertex Pharmaceuticals — fresh from its newly approved sickle cell therapy based on CRISPR — said yesterday it will pay Editas for rights to use in Casgevy.
Before settling into business as usual, a dispute arose when Editas was spun off from Harvard and the Broad Institute, where Feng Zhang had done some of the first work showing CRISPR could work in human cells. Two other companies — CRISPR Therapeutics (now Vertex's partner on Casgevy) and Intellia got their licenses from University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Vienna, where future Nobel laureates Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna led the earliest work showing CRISPR could edit genes in a test tube. Church, Doudna, and Zhang started Editas, and Doudna and Church have been involved in Intellia.
"There's plenty of different ideas and companies to go around," Church said on the day in 2020 Doudna and Charpentier got their Nobel call. ("Definitely they made the key discovery, which was that you … can program an enzyme, Cas9, to cleave at a particular place in DNA," he said then.) "In fact, if anything, there's not enough patents. Not enough companies." STAT's Jason Mast has more on what yesterday's win means for Editas.
health
A clue to nausea and sickness in pregnancy
"Morning sickness" is such a mild-sounding name for what can be torment. More than two-thirds of pregnant mothers experience nausea and vomiting, but a fraction are so severely ill they must be admitted to hospitals to get IV fluids for dehydration. New research in Nature finds a connection between levels of a hormone during pregnancy and such serious illness, but not in a simple way.
The "what" was already known: a hormone called growth differentiation factor 15. The "how" was not. It turns out the fetal part of the placenta produces high levels of this hormone, which causes trouble if the mother had low levels before becoming pregnant. That fits with previous research showing women with beta-thalassemia, who always have high levels of the hormone, rarely have nausea and vomiting in pregnancy. Understanding this inverse relationship — low levels before, high sensitivity later — might lead to treatments, the authors suggest.
health tech
Hospital records don't always show when a patient has died
Health professor Neil Wenger was deep into a years-long study on seriously ill primary care patients when he uncovered a different but persistent issue: Many patients who were targeted for follow-up interventions had actually died, and their hospitals did not know about it.
That's a problem for multiple reasons, including the fact that incomplete patient data could seriously impair health systems' charge toward AI and predictive algorithms. Wenger and a team of researchers are now leading the effort to get health systems to update their verification process and pressuring legislators to make death data more accessible. Read more from my colleague Mohana Ravindranath.
Correction: In yesterday's newsletter I mischaracterized the gene therapy seven-year-old Shelby Campbell received. The beta thalassemia treatment she got had been approved by FDA.
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