First Day of a ‘New Life’ for a Boy With Sickle Cell
By Gina Kolata,
The New York Times
| 09. 16. 2024
There was supposed to be a special party for Kendric Cromer, 12, last Wednesday, but it had to be postponed because he was too groggy to celebrate.
It was meant to mark the first day of his new life — the day he became one of the first children ever to be treated with a newly approved gene therapy that will free him from the sickle cell disease that has stolen his childhood.
On Sept. 11, despite the excitement of the moment, Kendric was unable to keep his eyes open as he lay in his hospital bed at Children’s National Hospital in Washington because of the drugs he had been given in preparation for his treatment.
His life with the disease has been punctuated by episodes of excruciating pain, requiring days in the hospital as doctors tried to control it. Sickle cell eroded his hip bones. It prevented him from riding a bike or playing soccer or even going outside when the temperature was below 55 degrees Fahrenheit because cold often brought on intense pain.
Now he could see a...
Related Articles
Gray wolf by Jessica Eirich via Unsplash
“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25
Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one...
By Katrina Northrop, The Washington Post | 04.06.2025
photo via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 3.0
China's most infamous scientist is attempting a comeback. He Jiankui, who went to jail for three years after claiming he had created the world's first genetically altered babies, says he remains...
By Kevin Davies, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 03.27.2025
Around 2018–19, there was not a bigger science and ethical story than the debate over heritable human genome editing (HHGE) and the scandal over the “CRISPR babies.” The scientist, He Jiankui, who attempted to engineer the germline of human embryos...
By Megan Molteni, Stat | 03.28.2025
WASHINGTON — Keith Joung knows better than a lot of people what, exactly, it might require to prove to regulators and patients that CRISPR could be safely used to alter the genome of a human embryo. If, of course, society...