Ashlie's video was 22 minutes long, but I was conscious for only the first two. And the sensation I felt when, the next night, I stumbled upon Ashlie, who softly narrated her actions as she brushed a friend's hair. This is the term that self-professed "tingleheads" use to describe what I felt when Ilse "cleansed" my forehead with a cotton pad, making a soft scratching sound into her microphone. I soon learned that Ilse is part of a vast online "whisper community." Her videos are labeled ASMR, short for autonomous sensory meridian response. My arm went slack I was snoring within minutes. But then something even stranger happened. She leaned into the camera, pretending to examine my pores and give me a facial. Pretty, with no makeup and charmingly crooked teeth, Ilse breathed her channel's name in a soft Dutch accent-" The Waaaterwhissspers Ilse"-and a tickly feeling spread through my scalp, a burst of prickly warmth followed by a sense of deep relaxation. This produced sterile waterfalls, classical music-and Ilse. Then one night I decided to search online for relaxation videos. But no amount of Celestial Seasonings could lull me into slumber. I tried all the sleep-inducing tricks I could think of: dim lights, calming hot tea, a noise machine that sounded like an army of jabbering crickets. Last winter, during a particularly exhausting stretch at work, I'd flop into bed just as the death metal singer at the bar downstairs from my apartment commenced his guttural screaming. Either way, as my iPhone rests beside me on my pillow, I'll feel a relaxing, slow-moving tingling sensation in my scalp-say, when the pink-eyeshadowed travel agent leans in, purses her lips, and asks me, in a gentle, enunciated whisper, "Are you looking to go exo- or stay inner solar?" Before I have time to contemplate the weirdness of her request, I'll be drooling.īefore you peg me as some sort of Internet fetish enthusiast, let me explain. Or perhaps I'll drift off as a ponytailed blonde role-plays an outer-space travel agent selling me intergalactic vacation packages. “However,” he continues, “the convenience of one treatment that can fix the disorder permanently is extremely attractive.On any given night, I might fall asleep to soft-spoken prattle from a grown man pretending to be a magic purple fairy. But the agency lifted the hold in October, allowing the company to begin enrolling patients in the US.Īnd like any novel therapy, Rajagopalan points out, “the treatment would have to compete with other safe treatment approaches that are already available.” For instance, statins and other lipid-lowering drugs are known to be safe and effective. ![]() ![]() In November 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration put a pause on the trial’s start, asking for more information on the possibility of off-target edits in other cells and whether the gene edit could be passed down to children whose parents get the therapy. Verve Therapeutics plans to enroll more patients in the trial next year, including in the US. “Ultimately, we will have to run those larger studies with observation for those outcomes,” he said. He said unwanted genetic edits could potentially cause health problems such as cancer, although he believes the risk is very low. “Safety is going to be of the utmost importance.”ĭuring the press conference, Bellinger said the company has not detected any off-target editing in human liver cells treated with its experimental therapy. ![]() You’re changing the genome forever,” said Watson, echoing the same point. But Rajagopalan, who wasn’t involved in the Verve study, says the main concern about any Crispr-based approach is the potential for off-target effects, in which unwanted cells or genes would unintentionally be edited. Sanjay Rajagopalan, director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, calls the results a “very exciting” proof of concept. ![]() “We're envisioning that this will ultimately be a treatment that could be applied earlier in the disease course to younger patients who have very high lifetime risks,” Bellinger said. While the participants already had severe coronary artery disease, and some had previously experienced a heart attack, the company aims to eventually treat younger patients in order to prevent these outcomes. The current trial is for patients with familial hypercholesterolemia, a type of inherited high cholesterol that affects around 3 million people in the United States and Europe, combined.
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