NIH and Gates Foundation launch effort to bring genetic cures for HIV, sickle cell disease to world’s poor

The National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will together invest at least $200 million over the next four years to develop gene-based cures for sickle cell disease and HIV with an attribute even rarer in the world of genetic medicine than efficacy, the groups announced on Wednesday: The cures, they vowed, will be affordable and available in the resource-poor countries hit hardest by the two diseases, particularly in Africa.

The effort reflects growing concerns that scientific advances in genetic medicine, both traditional gene therapies and genome-editing approaches such as CRISPR, are and will continue to be prohibitively, a gene therapy for a rare form of blindness, costs $425,000 per eye, for instance, and genetically engineered T cells (CAR-Ts) to treat some blood cancers cost about the same.