In the second session of GEN’s “The State of CRISPR & Genome Editing” virtual summit, originally broadcast on June 11, 2025, Johnny Mahlangu, MMed, Director at Haemophilia Comprehensive Care Centre at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and Julie Makani, MD, PhD, at Associate Professor, Department of Hematology and Blood Transfusion at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, Tanzania, join GEN editors to discuss the state of gene therapy and accessibility of these therapies in Africa.
New tools and delivery vehicles for CRISPR are only truly beneficial if we can simultaneously improve the affordability and access to these breakthrough therapies.
The advances in these therapies will be of limited help to patients in Africa if we don’t do a better job of including them in clinical trials, funding researchers’ labs directly and fast-tracking in vivo approaches that might make things more accessible to the millions of patients, many of whom are poor and live in rural areas.
In this session, GEN is joined by two experts in the treatment of blood-based disorders to discuss their latest work as well as to get their insights into the progress and challenges to the wider adoption of new cell and gene therapies to help the patient populations.
The entire virtual summit is available to watch free on demand: bit.ly/CRISPR25