For stories on the science of healthy living, subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter. Cathy Tie slips on a white lab coat bearing her name and the logo of her startup: Origin Genomics. "Welcome!" she says as she leads an NPR reporter, photographer and videographer on an exclusive tour of Origin's labs located in New York City.
Tie, CEO of Origin, asked NPR to withhold the exact location for security reasons. Once inside, Tie snaps on a pair of blue rubber gloves and points to a gray metal tank on the floor that looks like a giant thermos. "This is a cryogenic storage unit that has liquid nitrogen inside, which is where our embryos are stored," she says.
Tie twists open the black lid, letting wisps of white fog from the liquid nitrogen swirl out from the tank. Tie gently slides out a long metal rod cradling frosted glass tubes at the end. "So as you can see, there's four tubes in here," Tie says.
"Each tube can contain up to 10 embryos." These embryos were donated by couples whose families have been plagued for generations by life-threatening genetic disorders. Later, a wife and husband who donated some of those embryos tell us about their dream of having healthy children with the help of gene editing. But first, Tie explains how Origin's scientists extract stem cells from the embryos to test the company's experimental gene editors to see which of the molecular tools might safely correct the genetic defects, preventing future generations from suffering the same fate.
Tie wants to convince the world that the benefits of using her company's advanced gene-editing technology to fight inherited diseases outweigh its risks. Editing genes in human embryos that would be passed down for generations has long been taboo because of ethical and safety concerns. In the U.S., it's illegal.
"Hundreds of millions of people around the world have these diseases: Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, hereditary cancers, Tay-Sachs," says Tie. "What we are proposing is something completely revolutionary: Apply this amazing precision genome editing to embryos that have a mutation before they are born," Tie says. "That allows the next generation to not be born with these diseases.
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