UCSF researcher Kyle Cromer has been awarded the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2), a prestigious honor recognizing early-career investigators who pursue bold, high-impact research. The award provides $1.5 million in direct funding over five years to support Cromer’s project, “Engineering enhanced erythropoiesis for red blood cell disorders.”
Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the New Innovator Award supports exceptionally creative scientists proposing innovative solutions to major biomedical challenges.
Cromer’s lab will use the funding to develop new genome engineering strategies to cure sickle cell disease and related red blood cell disorders. His approach combines established curative genome edits with genetic modifications that boost red blood cell production — potentially enhancing the effectiveness and accessibility of emerging therapies.
“What excites me most is that this work could lower the threshold needed for a cure,” says Cromer, assistant professor of surgery in the UCSF School of Medicine and a member of UCSF’s Heath Innovation Via Engineering (HIVE) center. “By giving edited cells a natural advantage in producing red blood cells, we can make therapies effective even at lower editing levels and without toxic conditioning. That shift could make genome editing safer and more accessible.”
Current CRISPR-based therapies for sickle cell disease can cost more than $2 million per patient and require toxic chemotherapy to prepare patients for transplant, he explains. By pairing genome editing with strategies that increase red blood cell output, he aims to lower barriers to treatment and expand access to curative care.
The project will leverage next-generation base editing technology and benchmark results against the recently FDA-approved Casgevy therapy. Work will be conducted using patient-derived stem cells and advanced mouse models, in collaboration with Tippi MacKenzie at UCSF and Vivien Sheehan at Emory University.
The project also has broader implications for the field of genome engineering, offering new insights into multiplex editing and in vivo delivery methods that could benefit a wide range of genetic conditions.
Ultimately, Cromer says, this research could make curative therapies safer, more affordable, and more widely available for patients with sickle cell disease, thalassemia, and other blood disorders — while advancing new strategies for genome engineering across biomedical research.