Purrble, a socially assistive robot, was codesigned with children to support in situ emotion regulation. Preliminary evidence has found that LGBTQ+ youth are receptive to Purrble and find it to be an acceptable intervention to assist with emotion dysregulation and their experiences of self-harm. The present study is designed to evaluate the impact of access to Purrble among LGBTQ+ youth who have self-harmful thoughts, when compared with waitlist controls.
The study is a single-blind, randomised control trial comparing access to the Purrble robot with waitlist control. A total of 168 LGBTQ+ youth aged 16–25 years with current self-harmful ideation will be recruited, all based within the UK. The primary outcome is emotion dysregulation (Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale-8) measured weekly across a 13-week period, including three pre-deployment timepoints. Secondary outcomes include self-harm (Self-Harm Questionnaire), anxiety (Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7) and depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-9). We will conduct analyses using linear mixed models to assess primary and secondary hypotheses. Intervention participants will have unlimited access to Purrble over the deployment period, which can be used as much or as little as they like. After all assessments, control participants will receive their Purrble, with all participants keeping the robot after the end of the study. After the study has ended, a subset of participants will be invited to participate in semistructured interviews to explore engagement and appropriation of Purrble, considering the young people’s own views of Purrble as an intervention device.
Ethical approval was received from King’s College London (RESCM-22/23-34570). Findings will be disseminated in peer review open access journals and at academic conferences.
by Chao Li, Zhong Liu, Justin Anderson, Zhongyu Liu, Liping Tang, Yao Li, Ning Peng, Jianguo Chen, Xueming Liu, Lianwu Fu, Tim M. Townes, Steven M. Rowe, David M. Bedwell, Jennifer Guimbellot, Rui Zhao
A major unmet need in the cystic fibrosis (CF) therapeutic landscape is the lack of effective treatments for nonsense CFTR mutations, which affect approximately 10% of CF patients. Correction of nonsense CFTR mutations via genomic editing represents a promising therapeutic approach. In this study, we tested whether prime editing, a novel CRISPR-based genomic editing method, can be a potential therapeutic modality to correct nonsense CFTR mutations. We generated iPSCs from a CF patient homozygous for the CFTR W1282X mutation. We demonstrated that prime editing corrected one mutant allele in iPSCs, which effectively restored CFTR function in iPSC-derived airway epithelial cells and organoids. We further demonstrated that prime editing may directly repair mutations in iPSC-derived airway epithelial cells when the prime editing machinery is efficiently delivered by helper-dependent adenovirus (HDAd). Together, our data demonstrated that prime editing may potentially be applied to correct CFTR mutations such as W1282X.