Westchester County Executive George Latimer on the race for NY-16

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a former teacher aligned with “the Squad” in the House, has represented New York’s 16th Congressional District since 2020, when he won a surprise victory over 16-term incumbent Eliot Engel.

It was a turning point for the Democratic Party’s progressive wing during a moment when the Black Lives Matter movement hit its stride.

Fast forward to 2023, and Bowman, who still has the backing of progressives and has made a national name for himself, has also made at least one unforced error during his short tenure: Pulling a fire alarm while the House was in session, which led this week to his censure.

Bowman is also one of the party’s most vocal critics of Israel during a moment when the war between Israel and Gaza has whipped up a whirlwind of antisemitism across the nation.

The situation has left Bowman open to a primary challenge, which manifested this week when Westchester County Executive George Latimer announced his candidacy for the district. Latimer, who also served in the state Legislature, was encouraged to run by moderate Democrats, as well as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The district, if it stays the same geographically, will be a tricky one for Latimer and Bowman. It encompasses the northern Bronx and Westchester suburbs and includes some of the wealthiest communities in the country, including Scarsdale, as well as some of the most challenged, like Mount Vernon.

The county executive told Capital Tonight that he’s hoping the campaign won’t revolve around national issues, including Israel. Additionally, he said he won’t cede the progressive mantle to his opponent.

“What we’ve done in Westchester County is as progressive, or more progressive, than any other county outside of New York City,” Latimer said. “What we’ve done in terms of Black maternal health care, with our transportation system, our environmental policy, all across the board.”

Latimer is convinced that constituents want their elected officials to work on issues of immediate interest to their families.

“They don’t particularly need to have a national spokesperson on foreign policy. What they need to have is somebody that understands jobs, housing, remediation of flooding, transportation issues, climate change issues – things that are happening in our backyard,” Latimer said.

This is notable since Latimer came to the attention of funders like AIPAC via his support for Israel, which is apparently not absolute.

“Israel is a democracy, though there are things about the Netanyahu administration that I don’t favor,” he said.

Latimer is also cognizant of the optics of a 70-year-old white man challenging a younger candidate of color.

“I was an Irish-Italian kid, a working-class kid. I grew up in a Black neighborhood in Mount Vernon. I went to elementary and junior high schools that were majority African American all the way through,” he told Capital Tonight. “And I worked over the course of my public career with Lois Bronz (the first African American woman to be elected to the Westchester County Board of Legislators), Andrea Stewart-Cousins (state Senate Majority Leader) and Ken Jenkins (Westchester Deputy County executive and chair of the New York State independent Redistricting Commission), and I’ve had a strong relationship with the African American community.”

Capital Tonight is hoping to speak with Bowman next week.

Ginuwine reacts to Justin Timberlake ‘fo shiz’ incident in Britney Spears’ memoir

Ginuwine finally addressed the viral part of Britney Spears’ bombshell memoir, where she claimed her ex Justin Timberlake used a “blaccent” when he first met the R&B star.

“I definitely heard about it. People were calling about that. But I can tell you I don’t remember that happening,” the “Pony” singer, 53, told People in an interview published Thursday.

“I truly don’t remember that happening.”

Ginuwine — born Elgin Lumpkin — said if he would’ve heard the *NSYNC frontman, 42, doing “something like that,” he would have questioned him about it.

“I probably would’ve looked at him like, ‘Why are you acting like that?’” he said.

“If he did that, that would be something that I would remember. That would’ve definitely stuck out. So nah, I don’t remember that happening.”

After the release of the Princess of Pop’s memoir, “The Woman In Me,” in October, the part about Timberlake speaking differently around black artists went viral online.

Ginuwine finally addressed the viral part of Britney Spears’ bombshell memoir, where she claimed her ex Justin Timberlake used a “blaccent” when he first met the R&B star. Getty Images FOR ESSENCE
“I definitely heard about it. People were calling about that. But I can tell you I don’t remember that happening,” the “Pony” singer told People. Getty Images

In the excerpt — which was narrated by Michelle Williams — Spears, 42, described her then-boyfriend’s band, *NSYNC, as “white boys” who “loved hip-hip” and “hung out with black artists.”


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The mom of two said that “separated them” from other bands such as the Backstreet Boys.

“Sometimes I thought they tried too hard to fit in,” she wrote.

The Princess of Pop claimed in her memoir that the “Cry Me a River” singer and his band, *NSYNC, “tried too hard to fit in.” AP
“‘Oh, yeah! Fo shiz, fo shiz, Ginuwine! What’s up, homie?’” Spears claimed her then-boyfriend said to the R&B singer. Getty Images

“One day J and I were in New York, going to parts of town I’d never been to before,” Spears added.

“Walking our way was a guy with a huge, blinged-out medallion. He was flanked by two giant security guards. J got all excited and said so loud, ‘Oh, yeah! Fo shiz, fo shiz, Ginuwine! What’s up, homie?’”

Spears wrote that after the “So Anxious” crooner walked away, her assistant, Felicia, did an impersonation of Timberlake and he “wasn’t even embarrassed.”

Spears and Timberlake dated from 1999 to 2002. WireImage

“He just took it and looked at her like, ‘OK, f–k you Fe,’” she said.

Elsewhere in the book, the Grammy winner accused her ex — whom she dated from 1999 to 2002 — of cheating on her and urging her to get an abortion during their relationship.

Timberlake has not publicly spoken out about the memoir but he was reportedly “not at all happy” about it.

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‘Until There Is a Cure’: A Pancreatic Cancer Initiative Gains Momentum

Charles McKinley Reynolds Jr., at 83, had led a full life: a devoted family, loyal friends, and success in business. A Type-2 diabetic, he was attentive to regular check-ups and had survived colon cancer through the guidance of his then-physician and friend, Dr. Tom Scott, and later prostate cancer, through treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

In November 2020, Reynolds’ breathing was labored. He checked into NCH Hospital near his home in Naples, Florida, and was diagnosed with aortic stenosis, the hardening of heart valves, not uncommon in elderly patients. He was helicoptered the next day to Tampa General Hospital under orders by Dr. Guilherme Oliveria, head of Tampa General Cardiology. Expectations were Reynolds would undergo transcatheteraortic valve replacement (TAVR), a less invasive procedure than implanting a valve by open heart surgery.

The pancreas, situated behind the liver, produces hormones that assist in digestion and control of blood sugar levels. Pancreatic cancer, as in Reynolds’ case, is often detected too late to save a patient’s life.

“Charles was in great pain and suffered terribly,” Ms. Reynolds recalled. “He went to the hospital just before Thanksgiving and decided to come home after the TAVR. I said, ‘Are you sure, because you know what that means?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ve had my talk with God and I’m ready to come home. I don’t want to die in the hospital.’ We got him home on Tuesday. By the following Saturday, the day after Christmas, he was deceased.”

“Before the valve replacement, a biopsy found stage four pancreatic cancer, meaning the cancer had spread beyond the pancreas, in this case to his liver,” explained his wife, Reesa Motley Reynolds. “Nonetheless, they did the TAVR because they thought it would help him get stronger, with better breathing and blood circulation, so he could then go to the Moffitt Cancer Center, a premiere cancer facility, and be treated for the pancreatic cancer.”

But Reynolds always was a man with vision. While still hospitalized, wife at bedside, he arranged a conference call with lifelong friend, Dr. Louis Sullivan, the first African American to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and an over two-decade president of Morehouse Medical College; Dr. Scott, and a mentee, Dr. Alvin Harris, a fellow Morehouse College grad, as was Reynolds. Reynolds obtained a commitment that the quartet would launch a platform to expand research and public awareness about pancreatic cancer with a focus on pain management and, particularly, on how African Americans are affected by the disease.

“We fulfilled our promise by establishing the Charles McKinley Reynolds Jr. Pancreatic Cancer Pain Management Initiative,” Ms. Reynolds said. “From January 2021 and the following two years after Charles died, we assembled a working board of physicians, researchers, and others, and developed marketing tools. Our website debuted in January 2023.”

“In April, we were honored to join a delegation of about 40 minority health advocates and practitioners, under the auspices of the National Minority Health Quality Forum headed by its president, Dr. Gary Puckrein, to attend a White House discussion on President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative. The Moonshot goal is to cut the cancer death rate by 50% over the next 25 years, and to increase early detection.”

During November, Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, Ms. Reynolds said the institute will introduce a YouTube podcast series: “Until There is a Cure,” where she will interview physicians, pancreatic cancer survivors and family members who have faced the trauma of caregiving.

“African American men have higher rates of pancreatic cancer than African American women, and African Americans as a cohort, have higher rates than White Americans. We’re beginning to explore data on Latinos and Asians,” Ms. Reynolds said. “We don’t yet know if there is a causal link between Type 2 diabetes and pancreatic cancer. We haven’t seen evidence of robust clinical trials to test that hypothesis, so there is a need to fund that research.”

“As a key part of our mission, the podcast series will feature discussions about pain management. Within the health care universe, there resides this pervasive myth that African Americans can tolerate greater pain than others. That ignorance often results in inadequate, improper, or simplistic interventions or dosages for pain, for example, that morphine is the most effective regimen.”

Ms. Reynolds had her own negative experience with morphine. “I did well using dilaudid as an alternative. Charles, zombie-like under morphine, was more alert with dilaudid as well. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked for him. But the point is for family members to learn how to become better advocates for loved ones. I know Charles would have done the same for me. He was the man who taught me love.”

Justin Timberlake Viral ‘Fo-Shiz’ Comment Britney Spears Wrote About: Ginuwine Shares His Side

After getting eliminated on Wednesday’s episode of The Masked Singer, R&B star Ginuwine opened up about a viral quote from Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman In Me where she wrote that her ex, Justin Timberlake, approaching him in a cringe-inducing way.

“Nah, I don’t remember that,” the “Pony” singer told Billboard. “I would have probably looked at him very weird if he did that like she said.”

Ginuwine did have a kind word to say about him though: “I just don’t remember that, but I remember him [Timberlake] being a cool dude and me kicking it down there in Florida with [*NSYNC’s] producer at one time.”

According to Spears, she and Timberlake were in NYC when the encounter with Genuine occurred. “One day J and I were in New York, going to parts of town I’d never been to before. Walking our way was a guy with a huge, blinged-out medallion. He was flanked by two giant security guards,” she recalls. “J got all excited and said, so loud, ‘Oh yeah, fo shiz, fo shiz! Ginuwiiiiiine! What’s up, homie?'”

It didn’t go unnoticed by Spears’ assistant. “After Ginuwine walked away, Felicia did an impression of J: ‘Oh yeah, fo shiz, fo shiz! Ginuwiiiiiine!’ J wasn’t even embarrassed. He just took it and looked at her like, Okay, f— you, Fe. That was the trip where he got his first necklace — a big T for Timberlake,” she concluded.

Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams read the moment aloud in the audiobook, and it quickly went viral.

Spears went on to say N*SYNC “was what people back then called ‘so pimp.’ They were white boys, but they loved hip-hop.” She reflected, “To me that’s what separated them from the Backstreet Boys, who seemed very consciously to position themselves as a white group. NSYNC hung out with Black artists. Sometimes I thought they tried too hard to fit in.”

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Miranda McClellan ’18, MEng ’19 awarded 2025 Schwarzman Scholarship

MIT alumna Miranda McClellan ’18, MEng ’19 has been named a 2025 Schwarzman Scholar. In August 2024, she will join the program’s 150 scholars arriving from 43 countries and 114 universities from around the world. The Class of 2025 Scholars were selected from a pool of over 4,000 applicants. They will attend a one-year fully funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

McClellan and her fellow Schwarzman Scholars will engage in a graduate curriculum focused on the pillars of leadership, global affairs, and China with additional opportunities for cultural immersion, experiential learning, and professional development. The fellowship program aspires to create a global network of leaders equipped with a well-rounded understanding of China’s changing role in the world.

Hailing from Texas, McClellan earned a BS in computer science and a minor in African Studies from MIT in June 2018 and received an MEng in computer science in June 2019. While at MIT, she served on the board for the Black Students’ Union and presented recommendations for making the campus more inclusive. After graduating MIT, McClellan won a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Spain, where she studied applying machine learning to 5G networks.

McClellan was a fellow at the Internet Society, Center for AI & Data Policy, and the National Science Policy Network. Since 2020, she has been working as a data scientist at Microsoft, building machine learning models to detect malware. In 2022, she co-founded Black Arts DFW to promote equitable access to fine arts for Black patrons in the Dallas area. She also serves as a cybersecurity curriculum developer and mentor to improve representation of minority women in tech roles. As a Schwarzman Scholar, McClellan hopes to compare the impact of Chinese and U.S. policies on issues of cybersecurity, privacy, and AI fairness.

MIT’s Schwarzman Scholar applicants receive guidance and mentorship from the distinguished fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development and the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. Students and alumni interested in learning more should contact Kimberly Benard, associate dean and director of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence.

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FDA Approves Casgevy, the First CRISPR Therapy, for Sickle Cell Disease

By Kevin Davies, PhD

In a truly historic decision today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has, as expected, approved Casgevy, the groundbreaking CRISPR-based gene editing therapy for sickle cell disease (SCD), sponsored by Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

It is ironic that the first approved CRISPR therapy—a technology barely ten years old— should be for the genetic disorder that Linus Pauling famously dubbed “the first molecular disease” almost 75 years ago.

The FDA also announced approval of Bluebird Bio’s lentiviral SCD gene therapy, Lyfgenia. That approval comes with a black box warning on the label given the occurrence of rare instances of blood cancers in patients.

The FDA decision comes two weeks after regulatory authorities in the U.K. became the first country to approve Casgevy. (Bahrain followed suit a week later.) That news drew enthusiastic reactions from many scientists and stakeholders, including the CRISPR gene editing Nobel laureates, Jennifer Doudna, PhD, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD.

“Going from the lab to an approved [CRISPR] therapy in just 11 years is a truly remarkable achievement,” Doudna said, adding she was especially pleased that the approval helps patients with “a disease that has long been neglected by the medical establishment.”

The Vertex exa-cel clinical trial officially launched under the auspices of its partner, CRISPR Therapeutics, co-founded by Charpentier, in 2018. In July 2019, Victoria Gray became the first American SCD patient to be treated, by Haydar Frangoul, MD, and his team at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville. (Gray’s journey has been featured in an exclusive series of interviews on National Public Radio over the past four years.)

The Casgevy therapy involves the use of CRISPR-Cas9 to inactivate BCL11A expression in the precursors of red blood cells, thus releasing the handbrake on fetal globin expression, which in turn compensates for the SCD mutation in the beta-globin gene. [F. Urnov/The CRISPR Journal]

The Vertex strategy, which is being followed by several other groups, is to compensate for the SCD mutation β-globin by restoring expression of fetal hemoglobin (HbF), which is expressed in utero and switched off shortly after birth. The CRISPR scissors is applied in patients’ harvested stem cells to target the key regulator of HbF expression before the edited cells are restored to the patient.

“It is very exciting to witness how our foundational research, conducted 15 years ago, which established BCL11A as a key suppressor of fetal hemoglobin, has paved the way for numerous subsequent breakthroughs and insights. This progress has ultimately led to the successful development and approval of exa-cel today,” said Vijay Sankaran, MD, PhD, Lodish Family Chair in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital, whose genomic studies in 2008 (along with those of Swee Lay Thein, MD, chief of the sickle cell branch at NIH) pinpointed BCL11A as the key regulator of HbF expression.

“This experience underscores a critical lesson—the indispensable role of fundamental discovery science. Without such studies, many of these pivotal advances would remain beyond our reach.”

Among other notable reactions to the FDA news was a comment from Victoria Gray, who posted on LinkedIn: “I am crying real tears of joy and I can’t stop shaking!!… To all my fellow Sickle Cell Warriors help is here! We will never forget the warriors who we lost along the way!… our prayers were not in vain! This is only the beginning!!!”

In Tanzania, Julie Makani, MD, PhD, a leading SCD physician-scientist, hailed the news as “a momentous milestone” for SCD, one that would have “a major impact on our approach” to SCD therapeutic interventions. On the launch of a local sickle cell program 20 years ago, she said, “the message to patients was that there is no cure for SCD… Today, we can tell patients that gene therapy is available for treatment of SCD in the USA and U.K.” The Sickle in Africa consortium has enrolled more than 30,000 patients in its registry and efforts are growing to make gene-based therapies available in Africa. “The message has changed,” Makani said. “This is truly an example of translation of science to improve health.”

Thein, the NIH SCD expert, told GEN: “This is a major triumph for translational science and a major step towards curative treatment for patients with sickle cell disease… But let’s not forget the rest of the patients; we still need more small molecule disease-modifying drugs for patients with sickle cell disease.”

120 Years of hurt

A baby is born with SCD every two minutes. The disease affects some 100,000 people in the United States, the vast majority African Americans, and millions more worldwide. A point mutation in the β-globin gene—which NIH researchers deduced originally arose some 7,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa—results in the polymerization of the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin protein that in turn warps the shape of the beautiful, biconcave red blood cells, leading to excruciating pain crises and the risk of organ damage.

As Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, wrote in his best-selling book The Gene, SCD is “a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built).”

Throughout the 20th century, the study of SCD symbolized the bleeding edge of biomedical progress. In 1910, Chicago physician James Herrick, MD, belatedly published a case report of an unnamed 20-year-old dental student from the Caribbean island of Grenada, who had first been treated in 1904 by a resident, Ernest Irons, MD. Herrick noted the presence of peculiar “pear-shaped” red blood cells. Following a few additional case reports over the next decade, Johns Hopkins resident Verne Mason, MD, coined the term “sickle cell anemia” in 1922.

Herrick’s patient was identified only decades later by historian Todd Savitt, PhD, as one Walter Clement Noel, who arrived in Chicago in 1904 to enroll in dental school. He returned to Grenada to set up his own dental practice in the capital, St. George’s, in 1907, and was probably unaware of the 1910 publication. Noel died in 1916 and is buried in a family grave on Leapers Hill, a famous landmark on the north coast of the island, in a Catholic church cemetery overlooking the ocean.

Walter Clement Noel from Grenada was the first recorded SCD patient in the medical literature. He died in 1916, six years after his peculiar blood cells were published. He is buried in a cemetery in Sauteurs, Grenada. On the left, a plaque outside the cemetery entrance; on the right, the family grave where Noel is buried with seven relatives. [ Kevin Davies.]

In 1948, a Brooklyn pediatrician named Janet Watson, MD, observed that the presence of sickle cells in patients increases as their fetal hemoglobin switches off—a discovery that laid the foundation for the strategy of upregulating HbF as exemplified by Casgevy. A year later, Linus Pauling, PhD, demonstrated that SCD was a recessively inherited disease caused by an alteration in hemoglobin.

Seven years later, Vernon Ingram, PhD, working in the same Cavendish Laboratory where Crick and Watson assembled the double helix model of DNA, identified the precise amino-acid substitution in beta-globin. Around the same time, epidemiological studies in East Africa by Anthony Allison, MD, proved that the incidence of SCD coincided with rates of malaria—a vivid example of heterozygous advantage. In the late 1970s, hematologist Y.W. Kan, MD, and Andree Dozy performed the first prenatal DNA diagnosis on an SCD pregnancy.

But despite these scientific milestones, the experience of SCD patients has not advanced to the same degree. As the late science journalist Sharon Begley put it plainly: “The U.S. healthcare system is killing adults with sickle cell disease.” And while FDA approval of Casgevy is a moment for celebration, this approach won’t help the vast majority of patients worldwide. As Dhruv Khullar wrote in the New Yorker: “If we truly want to cure sickle-cell disease, editing genomes will only get us so far. We’ll need to rewrite our medical system, too.

SCD patients are routinely profiled and denied urgently needed pain medications by hospital staff. “There may be no population of patients whose health care and outcomes are more affected by racism” than those with SCD, hematologists Alexandra Power-Hays, MD, and Patrick McGann, MD, wrote in the New England Journal. “Patients with SCD are too often marginalized and dismissed while seeking medical care when their bodies hurt and they cannot breathe.” Making matters worse, many SCD patients lack basic information and/or access to generic drugs and screening tools that could ward off disease complications.

There is no good reason why fewer than one in five children with SCD are prescribed antibiotics, or the generic anti-cancer drug hydroxyurea, which boosts levels of fetal hemoglobin, is not more widely offered. “To have teenage patients who never heard the word hydroxyurea—that’s preposterous,” says McGann. Former NIH director Francis Collins acknowledges that the plight of SCD patients is indicative that “we do not have equity in our country.” There isn’t even a national registry of SCD patients, so no-one can say precisely how many individuals are affected.

More than 50 years ago, President Nixon signed the Sickle Cell Control Act, creating new treatment centers and increased funding. But SCD has not enjoyed the billion-dollar stimulus funding of the cancer moonshot or the philanthropic boost of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. In a study published in 2020, Duke University hematologist John J. Strouse, MD, and colleagues argued that by many metrics, including federal funding, philanthropic support and new drug approvals, support for SCD lags that afforded cystic fibrosis (CF), even though CF affects roughly one third of the number of patients in the U.S. as SCD.

A new hope

Until recently, the FDA had only approved four drugs for SCD, including hydroxyurea, which boosts HbF levels (although the mechanism is unclear). But hope is on the horizon. In August 2022, Pfizer acquired Bay Area biotech Global Blood Therapeutics (GBT) for $5.4 billion. GBT’s lead drug, Oxbryta, attacks the disease at its source, binding to β-globin and preventing polymerization. GBT’s former CEO Ted Love, MD, defended the drug’s list price of $10,000/month, insisting the company needed to invest in R&D to develop more efficacious drug candidates.

New hope for SCD patients is emerging in gene therapy and genome editing. NIH hematologist John Tisdale, MD, has been treating SCD patients with Bluebird Bio’s Lyfgenia™ (lovotibeglogene autotemcel), a form of gene therapy that uses a lentiviral vector and was formerly known as “lovo-cel.”

“This looks like a cure,” Collins told 60 Minutes two years ago in an episode that profiled patients in Tisdale’s care. The FDA also approved Bluebird’s lovo-cel therapy (Lyfgenia) today.

Today, nearly two weeks ahead of its scheduled target decision date of December 20, Lyfgenia won FDA approval as well. Lyfgenia is a one-time gene therapy custom-designed to treat the underlying cause of sickle cell disease. The therapy is indicated for patients ages 12 and older who have a history of vaso-occlusive events (VOEs), which Lyfgenia has the potential to resolve.

However, Lyfgenia was approved with the FDA’s highest safety-related warning that a medication can have. According to the boxed warning on Lyfgenia’s label, incidents of blood cancers have occurred in patients treated with the heme therapy.

“Although the approval of Lyfgenia makes it the company’s third approved product, we see several factors that could limit its commercial potential, particularly given the announcement of CRISPR/Vertex’s Casgevy,” Sami Corwin, PhD, a healthcare analyst focused on biotechnology at William Blair, and colleagues observed today in a research note.

Those factors include:

  • The boxed warning, which Casgevy does not have.
  • A list price that is $900,000 more than Casgevy.
  • Casgevy’s broader regulatory acceptance, with approvals in the U.K. and Bahrain; Lyfgenia will be commercialized only in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Beam Therapeutics and Editas Medicine are also targeting pursuing SCD among their lead clinical gene editing programs. At Boston Children’s Hospital, David Williams, MD, and Erica Esrick, MD, have published promising clinical data treating SCD patients using a short hairpin RNA approach.

But for now, all eyes are on Casgevy. Taking over the exa-cel program launched by CRISPR Therapeutics, Vertex published the initial exa-cel results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021. These represented not only a huge advance in treating SCD but also a crucial early validation of the clinical promise of CRISPR. Fyodor Urnov, PhD (Innovative Genomics Institute) hailed the results as “borderline utopian.”

Writing in The CRISPR Journal, Urnov, who literally coined the term “genome editing” in 2005, proposed that Gray be added to “the pantheon of names inscribed in golden letters in the history of biomedicine”—a list that includes James Phipps (the boy vaccinated by Edward Jenner), Albert Alexander (Florey treated with penicillin), Louise Brown (the first test tube baby) and Emily Whitehead, the pioneering CAR-T patient.

David Altshuler, MD PhD, Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ Executive VP, Global Research and Chief Science Officer. (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)

Utopian or not, the positive Vertex trial results have been extended to dozens of SCD patients, with no reported serious adverse events, although a couple of patients have continued to experience some vaso-occlusive events. The sponsors, regulators, competitors and other observers will be closely monitoring these patients for years to come. Five weeks ago, an FDA advisory committee meeting assembled a panel of experts to consider not the efficacy of the exa-cel clinical trial, which is not in doubt, but the issue of off-target effects, a theoretical concern with any use of the CRISPR-Cas9 “genetic scissors”. The Vertex investigators, led by chief science officer David Altshuler, MD PhD, appeared to satisfy most of the panel’s lingering concerns about off-target editing and the plan to monitor the long-term health of the exa-cel trial volunteers.

Not all gene editing efforts have fared as well as Casgevy. In August 2022, Graphite Bio, a Bay Area gene editing company co-founded by another pioneer in the field, Stanford University physician-scientist Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, launched its own “find and replace” SCD gene editing trial. But five months later, the company voluntarily paused the trial after its first patient developed complications. Graphite subsequently halted the trial completely, shed 75% of its workforce (including the CEO), and recently agreed to a reverse merger with LENZ, a biotech company developing ocular therapies.

Long road ahead

In one respect, this progress is astonishing. If the inspiring story of Victoria Gray is the medical equivalent of the Lindbergh flight across the Atlantic, the next challenge, as Urnov says, is to develop the equivalent of “routine, scalable, safe, and reasonably priced affordable air travel in a Dreamliner.” Urnov has been championing initiatives and regulatory changes to realize the clinical potential of gene editing in a New York Times commentary and in a recent video interview with GEN’s Jonathan Grinstein, PhD.

Despite Casgevy’s FDA approval, an ex vivo genome editing strategy that involves toxic chemotherapy, weeks in hospital, and stem cell transfusions is not going to be easily affordable or scalable. Vertex announced that the list price of Casgevy, a one-and-done therapy, would be set at $2.2 million. Bluebird has priced Lyfgenia at $3.1 million.Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics have set a $2.2 million list price for the one-and-done Casgevy, placing it within the same roughly $2 million range as other recently approved gene therapies such as Novartis’ Zolgensma® (onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi) and Bluebird’s Zynteglo® (betibeglogene autotemcel).

How will these therapeutic advances be translated to the millions of SCD patients living in Africa, Asia and beyond? Speaking at GEN’s “The State of Biotech” virtual event in 2022, Doudna predicted that a one-time in vivo delivery approach—without ex vivo manipulation and bone marrow transplantation—would ultimately be achievable. “Is that going to be possible? My answer is yes,” she said. “Is it possible today? No.”

For SCD patients suffering from “the most famous point mutation in genetics”, as Beam’s CEO John Evans calls it, Casgevy is not the end of the journey, merely a long-awaited beginning.

Historian Honored With New African American Heritage Trail Site

The African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard gained its 37th site Thursday when a plaque honoring late Island historian Robert (Bob) Carter Hayden Jr. was unveiled at the Oak Bluffs Library. 

Dozens of friends, family and colleagues of Mr. Hayden, who died in January 2022, assembled in the library’s first-floor meeting room to celebrate his contributions to African American history preservation and advocacy on the Island and beyond. 

“[Mr. Hayden] would be thrilled to know that we have continued to chase the dream of equality, and now have a dedicated site to all aspects of the African American experience,” said Elaine Cawley Weintraub, executive director and co-founder of the African American Heritage Trail, which honors the historically unrecognized efforts of people of African descent on the Island. 

A New Bedford native, Mr. Hayden was the author or editor of more than 19 books on African American history and held several positions at schools around New England, including assistant superintendent of the Boston Public School system from 1982 to 1987.

After relocating to the Vineyard in the 1990s, Mr. Hayden began leading African American history tours of the Island and founded a Vineyard branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He also worked closely with the Oak Bluffs library to develop a collection of resources on the Island’s African American history — made up almost entirely of books he owned personally — that is housed on the library’s second floor. 

“I’ve been director here since 2016, and 30 days after I began work here, Bob Hayden said, ‘Congratulations on your new job. Your library has a lot of work to do,’” said Allyson Malik, the Oak Bluffs library director. “The library worked incredibly long and hard with Bob… to create what became our African American resource collection. There’s nothing else like it on Martha’s Vineyard.” 

Kevin Hayden, Mr. Hayden’s son, said that his dad’s passion for African American history largely defined his childhood. 

“In my house, Black History Month was every month and every day of every month,” Kevin said tearfully. “So I know that he’s smiling down right now, beaming about the legacy that’s been left.”

To close the ceremony, attendees gathered outside to watch the reveal of the plaque, which is installed in a boulder beside the library’s gazebo. Together, Mr. Hayden’s family members pulled off a scarf draped over the plaque, followed by audience applause, cheers and tears. 

“This plaque is huge because we couldn’t figure out anything that we could leave out about Bob,” said Ms. Cawley Weintraub. “It includes who he was, and all he achieved, and how he stood up for justice.”