Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, an update on sickle cell disease.

Dr. Mark Gladwin is dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and one of the nation's leading sickle cell disease. Dr. Mark Gladwin is Dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine

and one of the nation's leading sickle cell experts. He joins Dr. Josh Sharfstein to talk about

exciting new treatments for this serious condition, including gene therapy that provides a lasting

cure. He also discusses the challenges to making effective treatment fully accessible to all who can

benefit. Let's listen. Dr. Mark Gladwin, you are one of the nation's experts in sickle cell disease.

You have devoted much of your career to researching this condition, to studying treatments,

and to writing the leading textbook on sickle cell disease,

thank you so much for joining me today in Public Health on call.

Oh, thank you so much, Josh, for having me here.

So I want to start with a pretty basic question.

Can you just remind me and our audience, what is sickle cell disease?

So basically, it's a genetic disease that affects red blood cells.

And people that inherit this disease have an abnormality of their hemoglobin,

which is the protein that fills our red blood cells.

And that's the protein that carries blood and carries essentially part of blood, but it carries

oxygen from the lungs to the body. And when you have this disease, that hemoglobin can polymerize

...