New medicine could prevent disease before it begins — but at a cost

As hay fever season arrives, once again, for allergy and asthma sufferers in the northern hemisphere, researchers in California are working on a new treatment that could prevent childhood asthma entirely — through a slight tweak to bacteria in the gut.

Scientists at Berkeley and San Francisco universities have found a link between these microbes and the chances of suffering from childhood asthma. So, now, using Crispr gene editing — a new technology that allows precise changes to be made to DNA — they are exploring how to alter the bacteria to remove the risk of children developing the lung condition.

“We’re at the stage where we have target organisms, and even target genes, that we know are contributing to a wide range of clinical outcomes,” says Susan Lynch, head of San Francisco’s Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine and the lead researcher on the asthma project.

Read the original article in Financial Times.