Inside The Lab Training Genome Surgeons To Fight Disease
Delaney Van Riper was exhausted. It was the summer of 2017 and she’d spent the previous day touring UC Santa Cruz’s cliffside campus, getting her student paperwork in order, and meeting some of her 4,000 fellow incoming Slugs. Now, dressed head-to-toe in sweats, she was ready to nap in the backseat for the ride to her family’s home three hours away in Sacramento. But first, she had to stop at a glass and granite building in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, roll up her sleeve, and give some scientists she’d just met a few tubes of blood from the crook of her arm.
While Van Riper spent the next year navigating new roommates and freshman poetry classes, researchers at the Gladstone Institutes were busy reprogramming her blood cells into stem cells and then neurons, growing them in incubators by the million, and sending in Crispr systems to try to cut out a troublesome mutation lurking on the short arm of her longest chromosome.
Van Riper, now 19 and a sophomore literature major, was born with a rare genetic disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, or CMT, which is slowly eroding her nerve cells’ ability to ping messages back and forth between her brain and her muscles. Doing things with her hands and feet, like walking and holding a pencil, has been growing progressively harder. But last year she became one of a handful of patients whose cells are undergoing experimental Crispr procedures at Gladstone that may one day be used to rid them of their genetically-determined disabilities.
