Food for thought! Is the Communist Party of the superpower China pushing the envelope too fast in an attempt to stay ahead or just negligent and careless about human lives like other communist parties before? Or was this only a singular, isolated incident?
Why the rush for this therapy? Perhaps, there would have been even a better therapy available in the near future.
Caveat: I did not read the two articles in their entirety. One of the articles is very long.
"On 24 March 2025, physicians and scientists in China tried to help a 6-year-old girl whose brain wasn’t developing properly because of a genetic mutation. They infused into her spinal fluid trillions of viruses that carried instructions to assemble a so-called base editor customized to fix the faulty gene in her brain cells.
Her condition was not likely to be fatal, but it could bring lifelong disability and serious medical issues. So her parents turned to an academic team, who developed the base editor and showed them evidence that it worked in the brains of mice and monkeys. The parents were told the risks were modest and decided treating their daughter was worth the gamble.
The trial went tragically wrong, however, according to a Science and Retraction Watch investigation written by Brendan Borell. The child, whose parents asked that she be called Mei (Chinese for “beautiful”), developed a fever and then signs of kidney damage. She died within a week after being treated. ..."
"... Doctors hoped to repair that mistake while her brain was still building itself. It would be a clinical trial of one, funded in part by $860,000 the parents had scraped together from their own savings and from relatives. ...
The parents felt they were in good hands. Xinhua Hospital, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, was acclaimed for its pediatrics department. ...
Although news that base editing saved “Baby KJ” would soon rocket around the world—Science named the feat one of the runners-up for its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year—the story of what happened at Xinhua Hospital has remained hidden. An entry for the study posted to ClinicalTrials.gov has not been updated for more than a year. And when Qiu and his colleagues published proof-of-concept animal studies related to the trial in Nature early this year, they stripped the paper of references to the family and its financial contributions ...
That vague language glossed over tragedy: Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, Science and Retraction Watch can now reveal. ..."
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