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 Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...