Rarely does a whole life’s work crumble in a single week, but James Wilson’s did.
Wilson and his colleagues were adding the final patients to a two-year clinical gene therapy trial, the ultimate goal of which was to treat a rare but devastating disorder that renders its victims unable to process nitrogen in their blood.
That Tuesday morning, Wilson received a call about one of the new patients in the trial: Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old from Arizona. After Gelsinger received his dose of the gene therapy virus on Monday, and the following morning his blood tests showed abnormally high levels of coagulation factors. It looked as if the young man’s body was seized with inflammation. “That was the first sign,” Wilson recalls, in a tone of composed regret, “that things were headed in a different direction.”
Read the full, original story here: The Fall and Rise of Gene Therapy
