Warrior Spirit: An Interview with Victoria Gray, Sickle Cell Pioneer
By Victoria Gray, Uduak Thomas, and Kevin Davies,
The CRISPR Journal
| 02. 14. 2024
In July 2019, medical staff in Nashville dosed the first U.S. patient in the exa-cel therapy trial, sponsored by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. That first patient was Victoria Gray, a mother of four from Forest, Mississippi, a sickle cell warrior and a true pioneer in the world of CRISPR and cell therapy. That process began 4.5 years ago. Today, she is healthy, enjoying a pain-free life with her family and friends—as are dozens of other sickle cell patients who participated in the trial. In December 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Casgevy, setting a list price of $2.2 million for the one-time therapy. In January 2024, Executive Editor Kevin Davies and GEN Senior Editor Uduak Thomas interviewed Gray for “The State of Cell and Gene Therapy,” a GEN virtual summit that was broadcast on January 24, 2024.
(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Victoria, how are you feeling today?
Gray: I'm still doing good—way better than I expected in the beginning. So life is good for me right now.
What can you...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024
Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash
When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy trial for “bubble baby” syndrome it was hailed as a medical breakthrough. The treatment had a more than 95% success...
By Victoria Bisset and Adela Suliman, The Washington Post | 05.09.2024
Photo by CDC from Unsplash
A baby girl born with profound genetic deafness can now hear unaided after receiving a “groundbreaking” gene therapy trial, Britain’s National Health Service said Thursday.
Opal Sandy, an 18-month-old from Oxfordshire, England, is the first...
By Carrie Arnold, Nature Biotechnology | 04.17.2024
Tome Biosciences came out of stealth mode on 12 December with a haul of over $200 million to develop the company’s gene editing platform. Tome’s first order of business was to snap up Replace Therapeutics to expand its toolkit to...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.24.2024
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she...