The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $1.5 million to Boston Children’s Hospital to develop a gene therapy for sickle cell disease, with the goal of making the drug technology more widely available in regions of the world with high rates of the condition.
Gene therapy holds promise to treat the more than 275,000 infants who are born annually with sickle cell disease. But such drugs are complicated — and costly — to produce. Blood stem cells are removed from the body, treated with…
