Louisiana Man Becomes First to Be Functionally Cured of Sickle Cell

A 23-year-old man from Metairie just walked out of a New Orleans hospital carrying a diagnosis nobody with sickle cell disease ever expects to hear: functionally cured.

Story Snapshot

Daniel Cressy, 23, became Louisiana’s first sickle cell patient treated with the gene therapy Casgevy.
He rang the bell at Manning Family Children’s in New Orleans on June 22, 2026, closing out a treatment journey of more than two years.
Doctors say his bone marrow is now producing healthy fetal hemoglobin instead of the sickled blood cells that caused a lifetime of pain.
The therapy uses CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and carries a price tag north of two million dollars per patient.

A Lifetime of Pain Ends With a Bell Ring

Cressy spent his entire life battling sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that causes red blood cells to bend into a crescent shape and clog blood vessels. That damage triggers brutal pain episodes, organ strain, and repeated hospital stays. Manning Family Children’s says he is now Louisiana’s first patient to receive gene therapy for the condition, and the first in the state declared functionally cured.

The hospital confirmed Cressy rang the traditional bell marking the end of treatment on June 22, capping a journey that stretched more than two years from diagnosis to discharge. Coverage from the Gulf South region says he is also the first person in that broader area to reach this outcome through gene editing, a distinction that reflects both the rarity of the therapy and how new it still is.

The Science Behind the Cure

Cressy received Casgevy, a treatment built on CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. Doctors collect a patient’s own stem cells, edit them in a lab to switch on fetal hemoglobin production, then return them to the body through a bone marrow transplant process. Tulane hematologist-oncologist Dr. Ben Watkins, who directs the hospital’s stem cell transplant program, said Cressy’s blood system was building a new immune system and producing this new hemoglobin during recovery.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Casgevy in December 2023, making it the first CRISPR-based gene editing treatment ever cleared for human use. It was approved alongside a second gene therapy, Lyfgenia, for patients age twelve and older with severe sickle cell disease. Regulators built approval on trial results showing the vast majority of treated patients became free of severe pain crises for at least a year.

Why “Functionally Cured” Is the Right Word

Doctors use the phrase functionally cured rather than simply cured because the treatment does not erase the sickle cell gene itself. Instead, it reprograms the body to produce enough healthy fetal hemoglobin that the disease’s worst symptoms stop showing up. Researchers describe the therapy as transformative rather than a total biological cure, since long-term organ effects and durability are still being tracked across the small number of patients treated so far.

That distinction matters, but it should not overshadow what Cressy’s family and doctors are celebrating. Before treatment, sickle cell disease dictated the boundaries of his life, limiting what jobs and activities he could safely pursue. Now he is free to chase goals that once seemed impossible for someone managing constant pain and hospitalization risk.

A Dream of Flying Takes Off

Manning Family Children’s says Cressy is now pursuing his goal of becoming a commercial pilot, a career path that demands a level of physical stamina and medical clearance that sickle cell disease made nearly impossible. His story fits a small but growing group of patients nationwide who have undergone Casgevy or Lyfgenia since their 2023 approval, each case adding real-world evidence to a treatment still considered new by clinical standards.

Sickle cell disease disproportionately affects Black Americans, and Louisiana’s health department has tracked the disease as a significant public health burden across the state for years. A homegrown case of this scale, treated at a Louisiana hospital by a Louisiana medical team, gives families across the Gulf South a concrete example that this therapy is not just a headline from a distant research lab.

The Cost Question Looms Large

Casgevy carries a list price exceeding two million dollars per patient, and the treatment itself is lengthy and physically demanding, involving chemotherapy to prepare the body before the edited cells are reinfused. The Congressional Budget Office has flagged that price tag as a major factor in how widely these therapies can spread, even as more hospitals like Manning Family Children’s build out programs to offer them.

Cressy’s case shows what success looks like when the therapy works as designed. His story does not settle every question about cost or long-term durability, but it puts a name and a face on a treatment that, until recently, existed mostly in clinical trial data and FDA press releases. For one Louisiana family, the science delivered exactly what it promised.

Louisiana now has its first entry in a small but expanding national list of sickle cell gene therapy success stories, and Cressy’s plans to fly for a living stand as the clearest measure of how much his life has changed.