Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, February 23rd. Today on Forbes, Gene Editing has struggled to go

commercial. This Nobel laureate has a $1 billion plan to fix that. Soon after K.J. Muldoon was

born in August 2024, he was lethargic and wouldn't eat.

His worried doctors realized his ammonia levels were scarily high.

Further tests showed the infant had a rare metabolic disorder, the kind of diagnosis that's

often a death sentence.

A team of researchers from CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Dowdena's

Innovative Genomics Institute, or IGI, and doctors from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

and Penn Medicine, began sprinting to create a custom treatment to fix baby KJ's DNA,

using CRISPR-based gene editing. Within just six months, they designed the therapy,

got lightning-fast approval from the FDA, and manufactured it. Baby KJ received his first infusion

on February 25, 2025, and today is a healthy one-and-a-half-year-old. It was perhaps the most significant milestone yet for the relatively new field of gene editing,

which Dowdna helped originate more than a decade ago.

But even she was floored by how quickly the team of physicians and scientists

were able to spin up the life-saving treatment.

The 61-year-old Dowdna told Forbes, quote,

I mean, I'm stunned.

I know the technology well, but I'm still stunned.

To say Dowdena knows the technology is an understatement.

Her research laid the scientific foundation for gene editing,

using CRISPR as programmable molecular

scissors to cut and slice up genetic code. She and her collaborator, French biochemist

...