Specialists at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland (USA) and pharmaceutical companies Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), and Allergan of Dublin (Ireland) are conducting a clinical trial, called Brilliance. During the clinical trial,  CRISPR-Cas9 gene therapy is administered directly into the body of a person with a genetic condition that causes blindness. The components of the gene editing system are encoded in the genome of a virus and then injected directly into the eye, with the purpose of deleting a mutation in the gene responsible for the patient's condition. This is the first time when the CRISPR-Cas9 technique is deployed directly into the human body; previous trials have seen CRISPR-Cas9 used to edit cell genomes removed from the body and later infused back.