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The 20th Annual U.S. HUPO (Human Proteome Organization) Conference was held in Portland, Oregon this week. The theme of the meeting, which brings together leaders in proteomics from both academia and industry, was “Bridging ‘Omics to Function.”
In her first trip to U.S. HUPO, Julianna LeMieux, PhD, deputy editor in chief at GEN is on the ground—in the talks and exhibition hall. She took a minute to chat with Jonathan Grinstein, PhD, a senior editor at GEN, on her takeaways from the meeting and the field of proteomics.

Proteomics in Portland: A Video Update from the U.S. HUPO Conference

In July 2019, Victoria Gray, a young mother of four from Forest, Mississippi, became the first patient to receive a CRISPR-based therapy for sickle cell disease (SCD) through the exa-cel therapy trial, sponsored by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. 
Her remarkable recovery since then, foreshadowing the successful treatment of dozens of other SCD patients in the trial, led to the swift regulatory approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December 2023. Casgevy, as the therapy is now called, has also been approved by agencies in the U.K. and the European Union. Gray’s inspiring story has been shared in a series of interviews since 2019 with National Public Radio and in a brief presentation at the Human Genome Editing conference in London in March 2023. But this is her first extended video interview, recorded for the inaugural State of Cell and Gene Therapy virtual summit, broadcast on January 24, 2024. In an exclusive 45-minute interview with GEN’s editorial director, Kevin Davies, PhD, and GEN senior editor, Uduak Thomas, Gray shares her story of being diagnosed at three months, years of living with debilitating pain and doctors’ visits, and the sustaining power of her Christian faith. She brings us into the hospital room at the Sarah Cannon Cancer Institute at TriStar Health in Nashville, TN, where she received the infusion of her gene-edited “supercells.” Gray also discusses the arduous weeks of preparation and testing prior to treatment, the road to recovery, her new life back home with her family post-treatment, and finding her voice as a public speaker. 
The front cover of the February 2024 issue of The CRISPR Journal showing a picture of Victoria Gray
Victoria Gray, the first patient with sickle cell disease to be treated using CRISPR-Cas9, on the cover of the February 2024 issue of The CRISPR Journal. [Dianne Paulet]
    The transcript of Victoria’s interview has been published in The CRISPR Journal (February 2024).

Sickle Cell Salvation: The Victoria Gray Interview

Using Patient-Derived Organoids to Predict Treatment Response in Pancreatic Cancer

This GEN Learning Lab features Hilary Sherman from Corning Life Sciences and Dannielle Engle, PhD, from the Salk Institute. You’ll learn about applications of patient-derived organoids to pancreatic cancer cases including examples that showcase the value of using these models to assess patients’ responses to treatment. You’ll also hear examples of how organoids’ predictive power is robust and consistent across passage, different sources and lots of basement membrane extract. 
March 2024 issue of GEN

Dancers look insane if you cannot hear the music. And yet the dancers we know as biomolecules usually get the benefit of the doubt, even if the steps they take, the ensembles they join, and the tempos they keep follow a logic that we cannot quite grasp. Usually, biomolecules perform as they should, sustaining our health, our very lives. Sometimes, however, biomolecules disturb life’s delicate choreography, giving rise to disease. To discover how this might happen—and devise remedies—we can take a close look at protein-protein interactions. Several ways of doing so are suggested by this month’s cover story. Other stories in this issue could benefit from dance metaphors. For example, we see how bioconjugates may consist of unusual partners, how spatial omics may suffer if the scientific dance becomes a legal dance, and how the music of the market energizes or depresses scientific careers. And we can see that cancer genomics and synthetic biology are getting ready to break some moves, too.