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1168 points jbredeche | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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vessenes ◴[] No.43998661[source]
NYT isn’t super specific here, but they made it sound like the disease treated is liver related. My understanding is that the liver is a good place to start with CRISPR-type gene treatments, in that the liver normally deals with anomalous shit in your bloodstream, say, like CRISPR type edits. So anywhere outside the liver is going to be significantly harder to get really broad uptake of gene edits.

It’s crazy encouraging that this worked out for this kid, and I’m somewhat shocked this treatment was approved in the US - I don’t think of us as very aggressive in areas like this. But to me, really hopeful and interesting.

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scotty79 ◴[] No.43998742[source]
I don't think it's gonna be that hard. All cells that blood reaches were happily taking mRNA vaccine.
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XorNot ◴[] No.43999719[source]
No they were not. A vaccine triggers an immune response, not a functional change.

mRNA vaccines are highly localized: you get a sore arm because most of it only gets taken up by muscle cells around the injection site, which spend some time producing the antigen and triggering a primary immune response (the inflammation aka the sore arm).

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1. scotty79 ◴[] No.44000936[source]
Still it needs to enter the cells all the same.

As for being localized it's true however after vaccine dose S proteins have been detected also in remote locations in the body because you can't make something 100% localized.

If you had an infusion that doesn't trigger immune system you could just increase the dose significantly, put it in the blood and most likely it would have reached all cells that blood reaches.

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2. im3w1l ◴[] No.44001649[source]
Last I heard those gene editing things lead to so called of-target edits, so they were basically corrupting random dna. Now in this case the baby would have died without this treatment so clearly benefits outweight the risks. But even then they probably want to have the dose be as low as possible.

But I'm speculating a bit here.