A year of gene therapy setbacks

It’s been a rough year for gene therapies, with setbacks spanning safety, efficacy and access, putting drug developers, patients and investors on notice that there’s no glide path to fast approval or revenues for this class of treatments.

This year’s events raise a series of new questions — many of which need to be addressed at the modality level — and resurface old ones. Still, there remain plenty of reasons to be optimistic about gene therapy long-term and its ability to become a mainstream modality...