The expense was similar to that of a liver transplant, which costs around $1 million, says Musunuru, but he thinks that will come down to a few hundred thousand dollars per treatment within the next few years.
KJ’s doctors will monitor him for years, and they can’t yet say how effective this gene-editing approach is. But they plan to launch a clinical trial to test such personalized treatments in children with similar disorders caused by “misspelled” genes that can be targeted with base editing.
They’re hopeful that approval by the US Food and Drug Administration will soon follow. Musunuru says the FDA has agreed on a trial protocol that could involve as few as five patients with at least three genetic variants. In November, FDA administrators described in the New England Journal of Medicine how the agency might approve personalized therapies like KJ’s using a new pathway.