The ability to edit genes in patients’ blood stem cells — which produce red blood cells, platelets, immune cells and more — offers the potential to cure many genetic blood disorders. If all goes well, the corrected cells engraft in the bone marrow and produce healthy, properly functioning blood cells… forever.

But scientists have had difficulty introducing edits into blood stem cells. The efficiency and specificity of the edits and their stability once the cells engraft in the bone marrow have been variable.

A new approach, described this week in Nature Medicine and in January in the journal Blood, overcomes prior technical challenges, improving the efficiency, targeting and durability of the edits. Researchers at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School successfully applied the technique to two common blood diseases — sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia — involving mutations in the gene for beta globin protein.