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Would any of this work for auto-immune diseases? Some of them are linked to genetic markers like HLA-B27 and HLA-DR4

Not with this approach. It's easier to add a gene to one cell lineage (in this case, the blood cell forming hematopoietic lineage) than to remove a gene from every single cell in the body.

But there are other strategies in development to help some patients with autoimmune disease. This is one of my favorite papers in that vein: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27365313

Do you have to remove a gene from every cell in the body, rather than modify the blood cells so they don’t attack the rest?

Right--see the paper I linked to above for an example of that. Here's a summary article: https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-ther...

If you can't access it then shoot me an email at ron gejman at gmail dot com and I'll send you the pdf.

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