B A Patient Hopes Gene-Editing Can Help With Pain Of Sickle Cell Disease Victoria Gray slides open a closet door, pulls out a suitcase and starts packing piles of clothes. "My goodness," says Gray. "Did I really bring all this?" Gray, who has sickle cell disease, is the first patient with a genetic disorder whom doctors in the United States have tried to treat using the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR. Today, Gray is getting ready to finally go home to Forest. Miss., after months away from her four children so she could undergo the experimental treatment, which involves infusions of genetically modified bone marrow cells. "I'm very excited,” says Gray, who has been living in a temporary apartment in Nashville, Tenn., for several weeks since getting discharged from the nearby TriStar Centennial Medical Center. "I know it's going to be emotional for me. I miss the hugs and the kisses and just everything. ” As a baby, Gray was diagnosed with sickle cell disease, which causes bouts of excruciating pain. The disease is caused by a genetic defect that turns red blood cells into hard, sticky, sickle-shaped cells that don't carry oxygen well, clog the bloodstream, damage organs and cause torturous bouts of pain. "The pain is excruciating. It's like being in a car accident and having lightning in your chest. It's a pain that makes a grown woman like me scream," Gray says. "It's an overwhelming pain." Like many sickle cell patients, Victoria had to drop out of school, quit work and spend weeks in the hospital away from her family. Since many sickle cell patients don't survive past their 40s, Gray worries whether she'll live to see her children grow up. She just turned 34. But Gray has hope now, because in July doctors infused billions of her own bone marrow cells back into her body, after editing them with CRISPR. Scientists used CRISPR to modify a gene in the cells to make them produce fetal hemoglobin, a protein that babies usually stop making shortly after birth. The hope is that the protein produced through the gene-editing treatment will give sickle cell patients like Gray healthy red blood cells. CRISPR enables scientists to make very precise changes in DNA, raising hopes that the technique will lead to new ways to prevent and treat many diseases. The sickle cell study is part of a wave of studies that are moving CRISPR out of the lab and into the clinic. Doctors are also trying to use CRISPR to treat cancer. Most of those studies are underway in China. But three patients have been treated for cancer in a CRISPR study at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and another study recently started recruiting cancer patients in the U. S. and Australia. 58. Why did Gray receive CTISPR treatment? A. Because she missed her four children. B. Because she wanted to do an experiment. C. Because she developed a sickle cell disease. D. Because she had genetically-modified bones. 59. It can be learned from the passage that . A. CRISPR has been successfully used in treating cancer B. CRISPR is still at its experimental stage in the labs C. protein produced through CRISPR gives patients red cells D. Sickle Cell patients stop making Fetal hemoglobin after birth 60. The author seems to believe the CRISPR is . A. dangerous B. promising C. ineffective D. time-consuming