When Brenden Whittaker of Columbus, Ohio, the first patient treated with gene therapy for chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), showed successful engraftment last winter, the gene therapy team lifted glasses for a celebratory toast. The wine they sipped was no ordinary wine. The 2012 Bordeaux blend came from an award-winning California vineyard owned and operated by Robert Baehner, MD, a pioneering pediatric hematologist with ties to Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center.

Decades before, Baehner had done fundamental research in CGD, an inherited immune system disorder that occurs when phagocytes, white blood cells that normally help the body fight infection, cannot kill the germs they ingest and thus cannot protect the body from bacterial and fungal infections.

Children with CGD are often healthy at birth, but develop severe infections in infancy and early childhood from bacteria that would cause mild disease or no illness at all in a healthy child. This was true for Whittaker. Diagnosed with CGD when he was 1, his disease became increasingly severe, forcing him to quit school several years ago. …