Gene Therapy for Permanently Curing Crohn's Disease

I’m visiting my parent’s house for Christmas and got to talking with my Mom about the prevalence of Crohn’s disease (or something like it) in our extended family. So I decided to look into how it could be fixed. To me, it seems like gene therapy is a promising approach to actually cure the disease instead of the current therapies which basically cope with it when it flairs up.

I found Dr. Judy Cho who has been looking into the genetics behind Crohn’s disease for a while. She is also interested in developing gene therapy for it.

In this podcast transcript from May, 2022 she goes over the potential therapy. A couple things I learned:

• Crohn’s disease can be cause by multiple different genes, so gene therapy is not as straightforward as it is with sickle cell anemia.

• The good news is that most Crohn’s disease is caused by a handful of common mutations. So you can hopefully solve most of the cases by focusing on a couple genes.

• Finally, she’s hopeful that the therapy will work. And she thinks we’ll know whether it will within 10 years.

I tried to find a more recent update than May, 2022. I found Judy Cho’s twitter account but it didn’t really yield much on this topic.