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News came recently of an apparent cure, via gene therapy, of sickle-cell disease in a young patient (whose condition was refractory to hydroxyurea and the other standards of care). Blood-cell diseases are naturally one of the main proving grounds for things like this, since their stem cell populations are in easily localizable tissues and the techniques for doing a hard reset/retransplantation on them are (in some cases) well worked out.

This is an important result, but all such approaches face a possible disconnect as they move forward. As it stands, such gene therapy is a rather expensive and labor-intensive process. Patients are carefully identified and handled one at a time, and there are a limited number of medical centers in the entire world that can operate at this level. The problem is, none of them are particularly close to the great majority of people who actually have sickle cell disease.

[...] Is there any hope that gene therapy and cell replacement could get to the point that you could carry it out at a useful rate in some of the places where it would be needed the most? That’s going to to hard, but this article at Technology Review by Antonio Regalado shows some progress:

In October, (Jennifer) Adair demonstrated a new technology she thinks could democratize access to gene therapy. Tweaking a cell-processing device sold by German instrument maker Miltenyi, she mostly automated the process of preparing blood cells with a gene therapy for HIV that her center is also testing. Cells dripped in one end came out the other 30 hours later with little oversight needed. She even added wheels. Adair calls the mobile lab “gene therapy in a box.”

[...] The many companies that are working on such therapies seem to be paying attention to this sort of work, because it’s not only a possible path to getting clinical trials run (and eventually patients treated) in the regions where most such patients are to be found. Companies are going to be selling such things first to people in the wealthier developed countries, but that’s only the beginning of the story (as it has been with antiretroviral drugs).