This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition.

The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling.

Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer. 

“I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the future of medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, an expert in gene editing at the University of Pennsylvania whose team designed the drug. “My hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them.”

The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them. 

In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells.

“In reality, this drug will probably never be used again,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who treats metabolic diseases in children and who led the overall effort to treat the child.

That effort involved more than 45 scientists and doctors as well as pro bono assistance from several biotechnology companies. Musunuru says he cannot estimate how much it had cost in time and effort.

Eventually, he says, the cost of custom gene-editing treatments might be similar to that of liver transplants, which is around $800,000, not including lifelong medical care and drugs.

The researchers used a new version of CRISPR technology, called base editing, that can replace a single letter of DNA at a specific location. 

Previous versions of CRISPR have generally been used to delete genes, not rewrite them to restore their function.

The researchers say they were looking for a patient to treat when they learned about KJ. After he was born in August, a doctor noted that the infant was lethargic. Tests found he had a metabolic disorder that leads to the buildup of ammonia, a condition that’s frequently fatal without a liver transplant.

In KJ’s case, gene sequencing showed that the cause was a misspelled letter in the gene CPS1 that stopped it from making a vital enzyme.

The researchers approached KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, with the idea of using gene editing to try to correct their baby’s DNA. After they agreed, a race ensued to design the editing drug, test it in animals, and get permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to treat KJ in a one-off experiment.

The team says the boy, who hasn’t turned one yet, received three doses of the gene-editing treatment, of gradually increasing strength. They can’t yet determine exactly how well the gene editor worked because they don’t want to take a liver biopsy, which would be needed to check if KJ’s genes have really been corrected.

But Ahrens-Nicklas says that because the child is “growing and thriving,” she thinks the editing has been at least partly successful and that he may now have “a milder form of this horrific disease.”

“He’s received three doses of the therapy without any complications, and is showing some early signs of benefit,” she says. “It’s really important to say that it’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy.”

The case suggests a future in which parents will take sick children to a clinic where their DNA will be sequenced, and then they will rapidly receive individualized treatments. Currently, this would only work for liver diseases, for which it’s easier to deliver gene-editing instructions, but eventually it might also become a possible approach for treating brain diseases and conditions like muscular dystrophy.

The experiment is drawing attention to a gap between what gene editing can do and what treatments are likely to become available to people who need them.

So far, biotechnology companies testing gene editing are working only on fairly common gene conditions, like sickle cell disease, leaving hundreds of ultra-rare conditions aside. One-off treatments, like the one helping KJ, are too expensive to create and get approved without some way to recoup the costs.

The apparent success in treating KJ, however, is making it even more urgent to figure out a way forward. Researchers acknowledge that they don’t yet know how to scale up personalized treatment, although Musunuru says initial steps to standardize the process are underway at his university and in Europe.

A US court just put ownership of CRISPR back in play

The CRISPR patents are back in play.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier will get another chance to show they ought to own the key patents on what many consider the defining biotechnology invention of the 21st century.

The pair shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for developing the versatile gene-editing system, which is already being used to treat various genetic disorders, including sickle cell disease. 

But when key US patent rights were granted in 2014 to researcher Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the decision set off a bitter dispute in which hundreds of millions of dollars—as well as scientific bragging rights—are at stake.

The new decision is a boost for the Nobelists, who had previously faced a string of demoralizing reversals over the patent rights in both the US and Europe.

“This goes to who was the first to invent, who has priority, and who is entitled to the broadest patents,” says Jacob Sherkow, a law professor at the University of Illinois. 

He says there is now at least a chance that Doudna and Charpentier “could walk away as the clear winner.”

The CRISPR patent battle is among the most byzantine ever, putting the technology alongside the steam engine, the telephone, the lightbulb, and the laser among the most hotly contested inventions in history.

In 2012, Doudna and Charpentier were first to publish a description of a CRISPR gene editor that could be programmed to precisely cut DNA in a test tube. There’s no dispute about that.

However, the patent fight relates to the use of CRISPR to edit inside animal cells—like those of human beings. That’s considered a distinct invention, and one both sides say they were first to come up with that very same year. 

In patent law, this moment is known as conception—the instant a lightbulb appears over an inventor’s head, revealing a definite and workable plan for how an invention is going to function.

In 2022, a specialized body called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB, decided that Doudna and Charpentier hadn’t fully conceived the invention because they initially encountered trouble getting their editor to work in fish and other species. Indeed, they had so much trouble that Zhang scooped them with a 2013 publication demonstrating he could use CRISPR to edit human cells.

The Nobelists appealed the finding, and yesterday the appeals court vacated it, saying the patent board applied the wrong standard and needs to reconsider the case. 

According to the court, Doudna and Charpentier didn’t have to “know their invention would work” to get credit for conceiving it. What could matter more, the court said, is that it actually did work in the end. 

In a statement, the University of California, Berkeley, applauded the call for a do-over.  

“Today’s decision creates an opportunity for the PTAB to reevaluate the evidence under the correct legal standard and confirm what the rest of the world has recognized: that the Doudna and Charpentier team were the first to develop this groundbreaking technology for the world to share,” Jeff Lamken, one of Berkeley’s attorneys, said in the statement.

The Broad Institute posted a statement saying it is “confident” the appeals board “will again confirm Broad’s patents, because the underlying facts have not changed.”

The decision is likely to reopen the investigation into what was written in 13-year-old lab notebooks and whether Zhang based his research, in part, on what he learned from Doudna and Charpentier’s publications. 

The case will now return to the patent board for a further look, although Sherkow says the court finding can also be appealed directly to the US Supreme Court. 

The first US hub for experimental medical treatments is coming

A bill that allows medical clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana. 

Under the legislation, doctors can apply for a license to open an experimental treatment clinic and recommend and sell therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to their patients. Once it’s signed by the governor, the law will be the most expansive in the country in allowing access to drugs that have not been fully tested. 

The bill allows for any drug produced in the state to be sold in it, providing it has been through phase I clinical trials—the initial, generally small, first-in-human studies that are designed to check that a new treatment is not harmful. These trials do not determine if the drug is effective.

The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans—a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers.  

These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. “I see no reason why it couldn’t be adopted by most of the other states,” said Todd White, speaking to an audience of policymakers and others interested in longevity at an event late last month in Washington, DC. White, who helped develop the bill and directs a research organization focused on aging, added that “there are some things that can be done at the federal level to allow Right to Try laws to proliferate more readily.” 

Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was “optimistic” about the measure, because “it’s great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy.” 

Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub.

But ethicists and legal scholars aren’t as optimistic. “I hate it,” bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments—and the risks of harm should something go wrong.

Easy access?

No drugs have been approved to treat human aging. Some in the longevity field believe that regulation has held back the development of such drugs. In the US, federal law requires that drugs be shown to be both safe and effective before they can be sold. That requirement was made law in the 1960s following the thalidomide tragedy, in which women who took the drug for morning sickness had babies with sometimes severe disabilities. Since then, the FDA has been responsible for the approval of new drugs.  

Typically, new drugs are put through a series of human trials. Phase I trials generally involve between 20 and 100 volunteers and are designed to check that the drug is safe for humans. If it is, the drug is then tested in larger groups of hundreds, and then thousands, of volunteers to assess the dose and whether it actually works. Once a drug is approved, people who are prescribed it are monitored for side effects. The entire process is slow, and it can last more than a decade—a particular pain point for people who are acutely aware of their own aging. 

But some exceptions have been made for people who are terminally ill under Right to Try laws. Those laws allow certain individuals to apply for access to experimental treatments that have been through phase I clinical trials but have not received FDA approval.

Montana first passed a Right to Try law in 2015 (a federal law was passed around three years later). Then in 2023, the state expanded the law to include all patients there, not just those with terminal illnesses—meaning that any person in Montana could, in theory, take a drug that had been through only a phase I trial.

At the time, this was cheered by many longevity enthusiasts—some of whom had helped craft the expanded measure.

But practically, the change hasn’t worked out as they envisioned. “There was no licensing, no processing, no registration” for clinics that might want to offer those drugs, says White. “There needed to be another bill that provided regulatory clarity for service providers.” 

So the new legislation addresses “how clinics can set up shop in Montana,” says Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, which hosted the DC event. Livingston built A4LI, as it’s known, a few years ago, as a lobbying group for the science of human aging and longevity.

Livingston, who is exploring multiple approaches to improve both funding for scientific research and to change drug regulation, helped develop and push the 2023 bill in Montana with the support of State Senator Kenneth Bogner, he says. “I gave [Bogner] a menu of things that could be done at the state level … and he loved the idea” of turning Montana into a medical tourism hub, he says. 

After all, as things stand, plenty of Americans travel abroad to receive experimental treatments that cannot legally be sold in the US, including expensive, unproven stem cell and gene therapies, says Livingston. 

“If you’re going to go and get an experimental gene therapy, you might as well keep it in the country,” he says. Livingston has suggested that others might be interested in trying a novel drug designed to clear aged “senescent” cells from the body, which is currently entering phase II trials for an eye condition caused by diabetes. “One: let’s keep the money in the country, and two: if I was a millionaire getting an experimental gene therapy, I’d rather be in Montana than Honduras.”

“Los Alamos for longevity”

Honduras, in particular, has become something of a home base for longevity experiments. The island of Roatán is home to the Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine clinic, which, along with various stem cell products, sells a controversial unproven “anti-aging” gene therapy for around $20,000 to customers including wealthy longevity influencer Bryan Johnson. 

Tech entrepreneur and longevity enthusiast Niklas Anzinger has also founded the city of Infinita in the region’s special economic zone of Próspera, a private city where residents are able to make their own suggestions for medical regulations. It’s the second time he’s built a community there as part of his effort to build a “Los Alamos for longevity” on the island, a place where biotech companies can develop therapies that slow or reverse human aging “at warp speed,” and where individuals are free to take those experimental treatments. (The first community, Vitalia, featured a biohacking lab, but came to an end following a disagreement between the two founders.) 

Anzinger collaborated with White, the longevity enthusiast who spoke at the A4LI event (and is an advisor to Infinita VC, Anzinger’s investment company), to help put together the new Montana bill. “He asked if I would help him try to advance the new bill, so that’s what we did for the last few months,” says White, who trained as an electrical engineer but left his career in telecommunications to work with an organization that uses blockchain to fund research into extending human lifespans. 

“Right to Try has always been this thing [for people] who are terminal[ly ill] and trying a Hail Mary approach to solving these things; now Right to Try laws are being used to allow you to access treatments earlier,” White told the audience at the A4LI event. “Making it so that people can use longevity medicines earlier is, I think, a very important thing.”

The new bill largely sets out the “infrastructure” for clinics that want to sell experimental treatments, says White. It states that clinics will need to have a license, for example, and that this must be renewed on an annual basis. 

“Now somebody who actually wants to deliver drugs under the Right to Try law will be able to do so,” he says. The new legislation also protects prescribing doctors from disciplinary action.

And it sets out requirements for informed consent that go further than those of existing Right to Try laws. Before a person takes an experimental drug under the new law, they will be required to provide a written consent that includes a list of approved alternative drugs and a description of the worst potential outcome.

On the safe side

“In the Montana law, we explicitly enhanced the requirements for informed consent,” Anzinger told an audience at the same A4LI event. This, along with the fact that the treatments will have been through phase I clinical trials, will help to keep people safe, he argued. “We have to treat this with a very large degree of responsibility,” he added.

“We obviously don’t want to be killing people,” says Livingston. 

But he also adds that he, personally, won’t be signing up for any experimental treatments. “I want to be the 10 millionth, or even the 50 millionth, person to get the gene therapy,” he says. “I’m not that adventurous … I’ll let other people go first.”

Others are indeed concerned that, for the “adventurous” people, these experimental treatments won’t necessarily be safe. Phase I trials are typically tiny, and they often involve less than 50 people, all of whom are typically in good health. A trial like that won’t tell you much about side effects that only show up in 5% of people, for example, or about interactions the drug might have with other medicines.

Around 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. And around 17% of drugs fail late-stage clinical trials because of safety concerns. Even those that make it all the way through clinical trials and get approved by the FDA can still end up being withdrawn from the market when rare but serious side effects show up. Between 1992 and 2023, 23 drugs that were given accelerated approval for cancer indications were later withdrawn from the market. And between 1950 and 2013, the reason for the withdrawal of 95 drugs was “death.”

“It’s disturbing that they want to make drugs available after phase I testing,” says Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “This could endanger patients.”

“Famously, the doctor’s first obligation is to first do no harm,” says Bateman-House. “If [a drug] has not been through clinical trials, how do you have any standing on which to think it isn’t going to do any harm?”

But supporters of the bill argue that individuals can make their own decisions about risk. When speaking at the A4LI event, Flanigan introduced herself as a bioethicist before adding “but don’t hold it against me; we’re not all so bad.” She argued that current drug regulations impose a “massive amount of restrictions on your bodily rights and your medical freedom.” Why should public officials be the ones making decisions about what’s safe for people? Individuals, she argued, should be empowered to make those judgments themselves.

Other ethicists counter that this isn’t an issue of people’s rights. There are lots of generally accepted laws about when we can access drugs, says Hoffman; people aren’t allowed to drink and drive because they might kill someone. “So, no, you don’t have a right to ingest everything you want if there are risks associated with it.”

The idea that individuals have a right to access experimental treatments has in fact failed in US courts in the past, says Carl Coleman, a bioethicist and legal scholar at Seton Hall in New Jersey. 

He points to a case from 20 years ago: In the early 2000s, Frank Burroughs founded the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. His daughter, Abigail Burroughs, had head and neck cancer, and she had tried and failed to access experimental drugs. In 2003, about two years after Abigail’s death, the group sued the FDA, arguing that people with terminal cancer have a constitutionally protected right to access experimental, unapproved treatments, once those treatments have been through phase I trials. In 2007, however, a court rejected that argument, determining  that terminally ill individuals do not have a constitutional right to experimental drugs.

Bateman-House also questions a provision in the Montana bill that claims to make treatments more equitable. It states that “experimental treatment centers” should allocate 2% of their net annual profits “to support access to experimental treatments and healthcare for qualifying Montana residents.” Bateman-House says she’s never seen that kind of language in a bill before. It may sound positive, but it could in practice introduce even more risk to the local community. “On the one hand, I like equity,” she says. “On the other hand, I don’t like equity to snake oil.”

After all, the doctors prescribing these drugs won’t know if they will work. It is never ethical to make somebody pay for a treatment when you don’t have any idea whether it will work, Bateman-House adds. “That’s how the US system has been structured: There’s no profit without evidence of safety and efficacy.”

The clinics are coming

Any clinics that offer experimental treatments in Montana will only be allowed to sell drugs that have been made within the state, says Coleman. “Federal law requires any drug that is going to be distributed in interstate commerce to have FDA approval,” he says.

White isn’t too worried about that. Montana already has manufacturing facilities for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer. “That was one of the specific advantages [of focusing] on Montana, because everything can be done in state,” he says. He also believes that the current administration is “predisposed” to change federal laws around interstate drug manufacturing. (FDA commissioner Marty Makary has been a vocal critic of the agency and the pace at which it approves new drugs.)

At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says Livingston. “We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there.” He won’t name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad. 

Mac Davis—founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial “anti-aging” gene therapy—told MIT Technology Review he was “looking into it.”

“I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism,” says Livingston. “There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment.”

Bryan Johnson wants to start a new religion in which “the body is God”

Bryan Johnson is on a mission to not die. The 47-year-old multimillionaire has already applied his slogan “Don’t Die” to events, merchandise, and a Netflix documentary. Now he’s founding a Don’t Die religion.

Johnson, who famously spends millions of dollars on scans, tests, supplements, and a lifestyle routine designed to slow or reverse the aging process, has enjoyed extensive media coverage, and a huge social media following. For many people, he has become the face of the longevity field.

I sat down with Johnson at an event for people interested in longevity in Berkeley, California, in late April. We spoke on the sidelines after lunch (conference plastic-lidded container meal for me; what seemed to be a plastic-free, compostable box of chicken and vegetables for him), and he sat with an impeccable posture, his expression neutral. 

Earlier that morning, Johnson, in worn trainers and the kind of hoodie that is almost certainly deceptively expensive, had told the audience about what he saw as the end of humanity. Specifically, he was worried about AI—that we face an “event horizon,” a point at which superintelligent AI escapes human understanding and control. He had come to Berkeley to persuade people who are interested in longevity to focus their efforts on AI. 

It is this particular concern that ultimately underpins his Don’t Die mission. First, humans must embrace the Don’t Die ideology. Then we must ensure AI is aligned with preserving human existence. Were it not for AI, he says, he wouldn’t be doing any of his anti-death activities and regimens. “I am convinced that we are at an existential moment as a species,” says Johnson, who was raised Mormon but has since left the church. Solving aging will take decades, he says—we’ll survive that long only if we make sure that AI is aligned with human survival. 

The following Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why are you creating a new religion?

We’re in this new phase where [because of advances in AI] we’re trying to reimagine what it means to be human. It requires imagination and creativity and open-mindedness, and that’s a big ask. Approaching that conversation as a community, or a lifestyle, doesn’t carry enough weight or power. Religions have proven, over the past several thousand years, to be the most efficacious form to organize human efforts. It’s just a tried-and-true methodology. 

How do you go about founding a new religion?

It’s a good question. If you look at historical [examples], Buddha went through his own self-exploratory process and came up with a framework. And Muhammad had a story. Jesus had an origin story … You might even say Satoshi [Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin] is like [the founder of] a modern-day religion, [launched] with the white paper. Adam Smith launched capitalism with his book. The question is: What is a modern-day religion, and how does it convince? It’s an open question for me. I don’t know yet.

Your goal is to align AI with Don’t Die—or, in other words, ensure that AI models prioritize and protect human life. How will you do that?

I’m talking to a lot of AI researchers about this. Communities of AIs could be instilled with values of conflict resolution that do not end in the death of a human. Or an AI. Or the planet.

Would you say that Don’t Die is “your” religion?

No, I think it’s humanity’s religion. It’s different from other religions, which are very founder-centric. I think this is going to be decentralized, and it will be something that everybody can make their own.

So there’s no God?

We’re playing with the idea that the body is God. We’ve been experimenting with this format of a Don’t Die fam, where eight to 12 people get together on a weekly basis. It’s patterned off of other groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. We structure an opening ritual. We have a mantra. And then there’s a part where people apologize to their body for something they’ve done that has inflicted harm upon themselves. 

It’s reframing our relationship to body and to mind. It is also a way for people to have deep friendships, to explore emotionally vulnerable topics, and to support each other in health practices.

What we’re really trying to say is: Existence is the virtue. Existence is the objective. If someone believes in God, that’s fine. People can be Christian and do this; they can be Muslim and do this. Don’t Die is a “yes, and” to all groups.

So it’s a different way of thinking about religion?

Yeah. Right now, religion doesn’t hold the highest status in society. A lot of people look down on it in some way. I think as AI progresses, it’s going to create additional questions on who we are: What is our identity? What do we believe about our existence in the future? People are going to want some kind of framework that helps them make sense of the moment. So I think there’s going to be a shift toward religion in the coming years. People might say that [founding a religion now] is kind of a weird move, and that [religion] turns people off. But I think that’s fine. I think we’re ahead.

Does the religion incorporate, or make reference to, AI in any way?

Yeah. AI is going to be omnipresent. And this is why we’ve been contemplating “the body is God.” Over the past couple of years … I’ve been testing the hypothesis that if I get a whole bunch of data about my body, and I give it to an algorithm, and feed that algorithm updates with scientific evidence, then it would eventually do a better job than a doctor. So I gave myself over to an algorithm. 

It really is in my best interest to let it tell me what to eat, tell me when to sleep and exercise, because it would do a better job of making me happy. Instead of my mind haphazardly deciding what it wants to eat based on how it feels in the moment, the body is elevated to a position of authority. AI is going to be omnipresent and built into our everyday activities. Just like it autocompletes our texts, it will be able to autocomplete our thoughts.

Might some people interpret that as AI being God?

Potentially. I would be hesitant to try to define [someone else’s] God. The thing we want to align upon is that none of us want to die right now. We’re attempting to make Don’t Die the world’s most influential ideology in the next 18 months.

The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food

Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS.

A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene editing. Not only did they succeed, but its pigs are now poised to enter the food chain following approval of the animals this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The pigs will join a very short list of gene-modified animals that you can eat. It’s a short list because such animals are expensive to create, face regulatory barriers, and don’t always pay off. For instance, the US took about 20 years to approve a transgenic salmon with an extra gene that let it grow faster. But by early this year its creator, AquaBounty, had sold off all its fish farms and had only four employees—none of them selling fish.

Regulations have eased since then, especially around gene editing, which tinkers with an animal’s own DNA rather than adding to it from another species, as is the case with the salmon and many GMO crops.

What’s certain is that the pig project was technically impressive and scientifically clever. Genus edited pig embryos to remove the receptor that the PRRS virus uses to enter cells. No receptor means no infection.

According to Matt Culbertson, chief operating office of the Pig Improvement Company, a Genus subsidiary, the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.

This project is scientifically similar to the work that led to the infamous CRISPR babies born in China in 2018. In that case a scientist named He Jiankui edited twin girls to be resistant to HIV, also by trying to remove a receptor gene when they were just embryos in a dish.

That experiment on humans was widely decried as misguided. But pigs are a different story. The ethical concerns about experimenting are less serious, and the benefits of changing the genomes can be measured in dollars and cents. It’s going to save a lot of money if pigs are immune to the PRRS virus, which spreads quite easily, causing losses of $300 million a year or more in the US alone.

Globally, people get animal protein mostly from chickens, with pigs and cattle in second and third place. A 2023 report estimated that pigs account for 34% of all meat that’s eaten. Of the billion pigs in the world, about half are in China; the US comes in a distant second, with 80 million.

Recently, there’s been a lot of fairly silly news about genetically modified animals. A company called Colossal Biosciences used gene editing to modify wolves in ways it claimed made them resemble an extinct species, the dire wolf. And then there’s the L.A. Project, an effort run by biohackers who say they’ll make glow-in-the-dark rabbits and have a stretch goal of creating a horse with a horn—that’s right, a unicorn.

Both those projects are more about showmanship than usefulness. But they’re demonstrations of the growing power scientists have to modify mammals, thanks principally to new gene-editing tools combined with DNA sequencing that lets them peer into animals’ DNA.

Stopping viruses is a much better use of CRISPR. And research is ongoing to make pigs—as well as other livestock—invulnerable to other infections, including African swine fever and influenza. While PRRS doesn’t infect humans, pig and bird flus can. But if herds and flocks could be changed to resist those infections, that could cut the chances of the type of spillover that can occasionally cause dangerous pandemics.  

There’s a chance the Genus pigs could turn out to be the most financially valuable genetically modified animal ever created—the first CRISPR hit product to reach the food system. After the approval, the company’s stock value jumped up by a couple of hundred million dollars on the London Stock Exchange.

But there is still a way to go before gene-edited bacon appears on shelves in the US. Before it makes its sales pitch to pig farms, Genus says, it needs to also gain approval in Mexico, Canada, Japan and China which are big export markets for American pork.

Culbertson says gene-edited pork could appear in the US market sometime next year. He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered. “We aren’t aware of any labelling requirement,” Culbertson says.

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly health and biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.