STAT
Paying for pricey gene therapy without insurance: Amish community faces challenge
[A]t $850,000 a person, Luxturna was more budget-busting than just about any other drug. [Company] Spark had proposed a few different ways of helping ...
Autism test that appears to work for monkeys may open research doors for humans
Researchers have been left empty-handed so far in their quest to uncover some measurable biological signal that could be used ...
Can we recode the human genome to resist viruses?
[T]wo years in, an ambitious project to synthesize genomes — including human ones — is moving on from its shaky ...
CRISPR patent dispute is back in court. What should we expect?
It’s baaaaack, that reputation-shredding, stock-moving fight to the death over key CRISPR patents. On [April 30] in Washington, D.C., the ...
23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki: No need for experts to interpret direct-to-consumer breast and ovarian cancer tests
My company, 23andMe, recently received FDA authorization for the first ever direct-to-consumer genetic test for an inherited risk for cancer. Specifically, it tests for ...
Video: How genetics is revolutionizing medicine and disease research
This three-part series of documentary shorts, produced by Retro Report in partnership with STAT, looks back at the roots of three of ...
Highly anticipated Luxturna gene therapy for blindness costs $850,000
The trouble had started over a decade ago, when the Hogans noticed something wasn’t right with their son Jack...When they ...
Viewpoint: GlaxoSmithKline abandonment of rare disease gene-therapy drug program because it’s not a money generator hurts children
When GlaxoSmithKline, long a global leader in the effort to pioneer gene replacement therapies, announced it would halt its drug ...
CRISPR update calms fears about off-target editing effects
The fear that CRISPR-based genome repair for preventing or treating genetic diseases will be derailed by “editing gone wild” has ...
Reconstructing genome of ancient bird opens door to reviving lost species
Scientists at Harvard University have assembled the first nearly complete genome of the little bush moa, a flightless bird that ...
Promiscuous bacterial ‘sex’ plays role in antibiotic resistance
Bacteria and fungi created natural antibiotics eons before drug companies turned them into medicines. To counter these natural microbe killers, ...
CRISPR as a ‘medical sleuth’: Gene-editing tool could detect Zika, Ebola and cancer
Some of the world’s leading CRISPR labs have, independently, tweaked CRISPR — adding bursts of light here and rings of ...
Harnessing bacteria like E. coli to dispense medicines shows promise, but hurdles remain
We’ve already seen the first cellular medicines, human immune cells genetically reprogrammed to attack cancer cells. Now the first bacterial medicines ...
Precision CRISPR repairs blindness in mice, could herald human treatments
In genome-editing, the challenge for CRISPR-wielding scientists is to edit only one of the two copies, or alleles, of every ...
This may explain why women are more likely to develop lupus
Every year, 16,000 cases of lupus are reported in the United States — 9 out of 10 of them in women. Scientists ...
Broken barrier: Monkeys are first primates to be cloned
There have been mice and cows and pigs and camels, bunnies and bantengs and ferrets and dogs, but ever since ...
Are ‘incredible genes’ protecting President Trump’s health?
Unless someone swipes one of President Trump’s used forks from the Mar-a-Lago dining room and sends it to 23andMe for ...
Why this winter’s flu is wreaking so much havoc
To put it flatly, H3N2 is the problem child of seasonal flu. It causes more deaths than the other influenza ...
Report: Price for blindness gene therapy Luxturna is ‘four times too high’ at $850,000
The $850,000 list price for a new medicine that treats a genetic form of childhood blindness is about four times too high ...
CRISPR setback? Our immune system may attack the treatment used with the popular gene editor
A new paper points to a previously unknown hurdle for scientists racing to develop therapies using the revolutionary genome-editing tool ...
Birth defects in Brazil linked to Zika, not insecticides or vaccines
In the fall and early winter of 2015, a startling number of infants in northeastern Brazil were born with abnormally small ...
Mars missions: What would long-term space travel do to the brain?
In a NASA-funded study published on [November 1], Dr. Donna Roberts of the Medical University of South Carolina and her ...
IVF ethics: What if your only viable embryo has a genetic disease?
[A]n emerging ethical morass in the field of reproductive medicine: what to do when patients seeking to get pregnant select ...
Controversial DNA test company Proove Biosciences forced to restructure
Proove Biosciences, a formerly high-flying genetic testing firm whose science and business practices have been challenged by experts and former employees, has ...
Zika vaccine now seen as unlikely, as project dropped
Vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur has quietly pulled the plug on its Zika vaccine project, a move that underscores how difficult ...
‘Futuristic star’: The scientist growing transplantable human organs in pigs
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte had spent years probing the inner workings of embryos, ferreting out the genes that give a ...
White supremacists flock to genetic tests to confirm their ‘purity’—but most find they have mixed racial ancestries
With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial ...
Having trouble conceiving? A new genetic test might help
More than 50 doctors have already ordered [the Fertilome test] for hundreds of women seeking scientific guidance on questions such as whether ...
