Ricki Lewis

Beneath all the bad news about viruses this week lies a good virus: the one that underlies gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID-X1),

Altered viruses are the vehicles that transfer healthy human genes into the cells of people in whom the genes aren’t working, providing a slew of new “forever fixes.” Nearly 100 gene transfer protocols are now in late-stage clinical trials. Read More 

A skinny little boy, with mocha skin and curly black hair, lived in the apartment building next door when I was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s. He didn’t live long enough to go to kindergarten. He had cystic fibrosis.

Today’s tots with CF face a far brighter future. A recent report in the Annals of Internal Medicine applied trends in survival from 2000 to 2010 to project life expectancy for children diagnosed in 2010: 37 years for girls and 40 years for boys. (The difference may reflect hormones or the extra creatinine in the more muscular male of the species.) Factoring in the current rate of treatment improvements gives a soaring median survival of 54 years for women and 58 years for men when those kids grow up! Read More