Broad Institute of MIT and HarvardJul 11 2024 A three-drug cocktail known as Trikafta has greatly improved patient quality of life since its development in 2019, but can cause cataracts and liver damage and must be taken daily at a cost of about $300,000 per year.
The new method, published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering, precisely and durably corrects the mutation in human lung cells, restoring cell function to levels similar to that of Trikafta. The approach is based on a technique called prime editing, which can make insertions, deletions, and substitutions up to hundreds of base pairs long in the genome with few unwanted byproducts.
Gene repair Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in the CFTR gene that impair ion channels in the cell membrane that pump chloride out of cells. There are more than 2,000 known variants of the CFTR gene, 700 of which cause disease. The most common is a three base-pair CTT deletion that causes the ion channel protein to misfold and degrade.
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