The National Health Service's blood donation programme, NHS Blood and Transplant, needs more black donors and they aren't shy to say so. But the service has been getting a lot of flak recently for singling out one racial group. In a now-viral thread, @GiveBloodNHS made it clear that asking black people to donate isn't about racism or racial profiling; it's about making sure they have enough blood to treat the black community. Now, that might sound wrong since we're often told that underneath our skin everyone is the same, but that's a vast oversimplification, according to the NHS. Humans don't all have the same blood regardless of race, and black people are more likely to have a specific type of blood that's good for treating sickle cell anemia, a disease that affects mostly the black community.

For the last two decades, they’ve had the option of artificially fertilizing embryos and selecting only those that lack the sickle cell trait. Now a new possibility is on the horizon: They may soon be able to edit the offending gene right out of their own sperm, eggs or embryos, erasing it from their bloodline forever. The technology that will allow this is called Crispr-Cas9. It’s relatively cheap and it permits scientists to change DNA with an ease and precision that until now has been impossible. The promise is that it will transform medicine by vanquishing previously incurable diseases. The method is probably at least a few years away from being applied in clinical settings. Still, some are already worried that, when it comes to improving our own genome, we don’t yet know enough about how genes work to wield this power without unintended consequences.

Study opens path to earlier diagnosis, targeted therapies. Patients with sickle cell anemia (SCA) develop heart complications and nearly a quarter die a sudden death. Now, researchers have linked malfunctioning molecular pathways to specific heart anomalies in SCA that result from progressive fibrosis and result in sudden death. The study opens a path to earlier noninvasive diagnosis and development of new targeted therapies to help SCA patients live longer with better quality of life.

A national sickle cell disease study involving Medical University of South Carolina researchers found that for some children with sickle cell disease, the drug hydroxyurea is as effective as blood transfusions to reduce blood flow speeds in the brain. Increased blood flows are a major risk factor for stroke in these children. Study findings were published Dec. 6 in The Lancet and were presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting.

"It was a privilege to be a part of this well-designed and executed study. Russell Ware presented the results at the ASH meeting, and 18 years ago, almost to the day, I presented the STOP study results to the same meeting," said Robert J. Adams, M.D., study principal investigator, MUSC professor of neurosciences and director of the South Carolina Stroke Center of Economic Excellence. "

Many children with sickle cell disease experience frequent and severe pain episodes, requiring emergency room visits or hospitalization. In search of more effective ways to treat such pain, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that adding a low dose of the drug methadone to standard treatment can limit pain experienced by children with the condition. "More than half of sickle cell patients have at least one episode of significant pain every year, and about 20 percent experience multiple episodes each year that require hospital stays," said first author Jennifer Horst, MD, an instructor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and an emergency room physician at St. Louis Children's Hospital. "In this study, the pediatric patients who received a one-time dose of methadone rated their pain levels much lower than those who took standard pain-killing drugs. In many cases, their pain went away, so we believe methadone has the potential to make life better for these pediatric patients."

A precision-engineered gene therapy virus, inserted into blood stem cells that are then transplanted, markedly reduced sickle-induced red-cell damage in mice with sickle cell disease, researchers from Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center report today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The work sets the stage for bringing a decades-old discovery about sickle-cell disease to the bedside. A clinical gene therapy trial, using a virus rendered harmless in the laboratory, is expected to launch in the coming year.

Sickle cell disease is characterized by recurrent episodes of "sickle crisis," also known as vaso-occlusive crisis, in which a patient's red blood cells change shape, clump together and block the flow of blood in small vessels resulting in pain and organ damage. In an editorial in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researcher stresses the need for a multi-pronged approach to treating sickle-cell disease in order to prevent these harmful episodes.

A new study in JAMA provides evidence that hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), a common blood biomarker used to measure blood sugar over time, may not perform as accurately among African-Americans with sickle cell trait and could be leading to a systemic underestimation of blood sugar control among that population. Sickle cell trait (SCT) is a genetic hemoglobin variant found in 8 to 10 percent of African-Americans. It occurs in people with one copy of the mutation that, if they had two copies, would result in sickle cell disease. The analysis of data from more than 4,600 people participating in two major studies found that HbA1c readings were significantly lower in individuals with SCT than in those without SCT, even after accounting for several possible confounding factors.

Small study shows some on opioids reported more pain, fatigue. In a small study looking at pain assessments in adults with sickle cell disease, researchers at Johns Hopkins says overall, those treated long-term with opioids often fared worse in measures of pain, fatigue and curtailed daily activities than those not on long-term opioids. In a report on the new research, published online on June 15 in a special sickle cell disease supplement of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, C. Patrick Carroll, M.D., and colleagues evaluated pain experiences of participants with sickle cell disease who were prescribed long-term opioids.

MaxCyte, a US-based global company dedicated to driving the acceleration of discovery, development, manufacturing and commercialization of next-generation, cell-based medicines, announced today it will present positive preclinical study results at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Annual Meeting (ASGCT). The new in vitro data demonstrate the potential of MaxCyte's cGMP-compliant proprietary delivery platform to enable CRISPR gene editing in the treatment of sickle cell disease (SCD). The ASGCT meeting will take place in Washington, DC from May 10-13, 2017.