Amy Nordrum

to devote to that research.

So there could be some kind of second, second, third order effects like that.

And certainly a number of these private space companies intend to provide access to countries that have never before had access to the International Space Station or been able to send astronauts up there.

Well, this year we put it on the list because there was a quite remarkable treatment done back in May of 2025 when a baby named KJ was treated for a rare genetic condition that this baby had with a gene editing treatment that was designed just for him.

It's the first of its kind that's been personalized in this way.

There have been other gene editing treatments based on CRISPR in the past, but this one was designed just for KJ based on the misspelling in his DNA.

And it was done with a newer form of CRISPR, the gene editing tool, called base editing that actually lets you rewrite individual letters rather than just delete or snip out genes as the first iteration of CRISPR did.

So we think it's the first of its kind.

Yeah.

Honestly, we don't know quite how it went yet.

The baby seems to be doing much better this many months on.

But it's the first example of this kind of new highly personalized gene editing treatment that many more people could receive with very rare conditions that wouldn't otherwise be attractive to a pharmaceutical company to develop a treatment for.

Well, physicians, researchers that did this at the University of Pennsylvania, they'll need to continue to watch closely and see what the results were and whether there are any.

unintended effects, but they do tend to move forward with the trial on this technology so that they can actually get FDA approval for it.

You know, it will certainly likely be very expensive because we're talking here about a treatment for literally designed for one person.

You know, the estimates I heard with this one example were between $800,000 to a million dollars, which is

is roughly maybe the cost of a liver transplant, but certainly out of reach for many.

What could be the impact in decades to come?

It's a great question.

I mean, there's, you know, potentially thousands of genetic diseases that could potentially, you know, be treated this way and are quite rare.