Sangamo Therapeutics has started dosing patients with gene-editing drugs that are administered directly into the blood.

Sangamo's zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) are enzymes that selectively bind, cleave and enable the directed repair of DNA to knock genes both in and out of patient genomes. In 2011, their first clinical application of a ZFN-based drug relied on ex vivo gene editing; researchers harvested T cells from HIV-positive patients, edited the cells to disrupt the CCR5 gene, and then re-infused these back into the patients in the hopes that the engineered cells would evade infection.

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