CRISPIR and Blood Disorders

In an article written by Jocelyn Kaiser, she discusses the impact of CRISPIR on blood disorders, mainly sickle cell anemia and beta-thalassemia. People with sickle cell anemia are born with mutations in a gene for hemoglobin and people with beta-thalassemia make almost no hemoglobin also due to mutations.  In new treatments, researchers have tweaked the genes to allow hemoglobin production. They disable a genetic switch that turns off a fetal form of hemoglobin. This fetal hemoglobin is enough to to replace the missing hemoglobin from sickle cell and beta-thalassemia. I think this is interesting because people can actually cure diseases using these new techniques. I also think this type of  treatment will become more common in the future.