Deerfield Management is putting up $2bn for early-stage life sciences research through to 2030, but what does its involvement mean for its partner universities?
We certainly have come a long way since Martin Cline’s disastrous gene transfer experiment at University of California, Los Angeles ignited a public scandal forty years ago.
Cline injected recombinant DNA to treat two patients at foreign clinics with terminal hereditary blood disorders, however, the ethical debate remained in its infancy.
US guidelines explicitly forbade the experiment, although, technically, without jurisdiction over Cline’s subjects. The conservative religious lobby still had a field day and Cline was forced to resign his departmental chairmanship, amid the glare of an extensive public inquiry.
Regulatory scrutiny also daunted the inventors of the first successful gene therapy, Strimvelis, decades later, although they possessed one crucial advantage.
In severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), the team at San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-TIGET) was addressing devastation to life from a very young age, and a disease that had had comprehensive media coverage.
The public had been…
