How important do you think it is to bet on yourself before anyone else does?

I think that your first investor, no matter what you're doing and no matter what resource we are talking about, has to be you.

So are we talking about time? Are we talking about blood? Are we talking about sweat? Are we talking about tears? Are we talking about money? Whoever that is, whatever that resource is, you can forge something.

And as soon as you put a little bit up, maybe it is like what I did where I paid a couple of friends to help me make a little demo because people weren't taking to the idea right away.

So I said, oh, well, maybe if I put something on camera and get to know the character and the premise, that'll help.

Sure enough, I get some friends.

rent a camera i dress up in a referee uniform i go to the playgrounds in the inner city and i tell the players who are playing pickup basketball that i'm from the city of la and they have a new program they're exploring where they send refs to pick up courts all across the city and so i'm gonna ref your games and we're gonna film it so that our bosses can see if it works And we do that.

You

So can you tell us about this gene therapy research that you've done and specifically gene therapy used to treat sickle cell? What is different about this and how does it work?

Yeah, so gene therapy is really just a tremendous advance.

It's one of the biggest things in modern medicine to come out in a while.

And so, you know, sickle cell disease is caused by a mutation that results in an an abnormally shaped red blood cell.

So under stress, a patient with sickle cell disease, their cells will collapse.

Instead of being perfectly round, they form like a sickle shape, which is like a crescent shape.

Those red blood cells don't flow well through the bloodstream.

And how long did he have to be in the hospital? How kind of immunocompromised was he?

So either Ben or Puja, would you like to comment on where you see the, I guess, the alpha/beta approaches or any of the other novel graft manipulation approaches fitting in and, and why they have advantages in certain scenarios?

Yeah, happy to chime in on that.

I think the data are really exciting, especially with some of the graft manipulation which can limit the use of calcineurin inhibitors with the alpha/beta especially.

I, I agree.

I think the big challenge is it's logistically very challenging and, and we're not a big center here at Tulane and Manning Family, and so we don't actually perform those on site.

We've-- I've done a handful of those, but we've always had to send them off to get manipulated and then sent back to us.

So it is gonna be hard to export, but I think the outcomes and, and the data is very positive i-in both of these naive T-cell depletion or alpha/beta depletion.

So where do you think the Aba space is going, and what are the steps to sort of make it even more broadly accepted?