Rethinking the cost of curing sickle cell disease

Gene therapies for sickle cell disease are already changing lives in high-income countries, but in places like Uganda—where the burden of disease is among the highest in the world—the same treatments can seem economically out of reach.

A new study led by Felipe Montano-Campos, formerly a graduate student in Dr. Ryan Hansen’s group at the University of Washington CHOICE Institute, takes a closer look at whether that assumption holds. The work, published in Gene Therapy, asks a deceptively simple question: can gene therapies ever be cost-effective in a low-income setting where sickle cell disease (SCD) is most common?