For years, we’ve known that genetic diseases could one day be cured by technologies like Crispr.
But there has always been a catch: These technologies can only fix the genome in the parts of the body that they can reach, and right now, their reach is very limited. Pick your favorite flavor of genetic therapy — Crispr, mRNA, siRNA, DNA — and they all have the same delivery problem. The liver, eyes and blood — those are the main places where cures might be possible.
But after about 20 years of incremental progress, there’s a chance of something entirely new. A privately held biotech company called Aera Therapeutics came out of stealth recently to debut a type of protein nanoparticle that it believes can be used to ferry all sorts of genetic medicines around the body.