gene therapy

One of the biggest problems in treating HIV patients is the amount of daily individual medications it takes to keep the virus at bay. In a new study, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have engineered a new approach to tailored gene therapy that they say makes key cells of the immune system resistant to attack from the HIV virus, which may eventually lead to the removal of life-long dependencies on drugs for patients living with HIV.  Read More

One of the key processes in gene therapy involves taking cells from the patient, injecting a therapeutic genetic material into them, then reintroducing them to the patient’s body and letting them go to work. Unfortunately, getting that material into the cells can be tricky. While larger cells can actually be punctured with a fine needle, most human cells are too small for that approach to be possible. There are also methods of inserting random amounts of material into bulk quantities of cells, but these are inexact. Now, however, scientists at Ohio State University are reporting success with a process known as “nanochannel electroporation” (NEP), in which therapeutic biomolecules are electrically shot into cells.  Read More

Spider silk is pretty amazing stuff. Pound for pound, it has a tensile strength close to that of steel while being one-fifth as dense, it’s tougher than Kevlar, and it can stretch to almost one-and-a-half times its length without breaking. As if that wasn’t enough, it now appears that a genetically engineered version of the substance could be used for delivering genes into human cells.  Read More

Using a virus containing a ‘library’ of DNA, researchers from the University of Leeds in the U.K., working with the Mayo Clinic in the U.S., have developed a vaccine that was able to destroy prostate cancer tumors in mice, while leaving healthy tissue untouched. Because the virus contains multiple fragments of genes, the vaccine is able to produce many possible antigens thereby boosting its effectiveness. The technique could be used to create vaccines to treat a wide range of cancers, including breast, pancreatic and lung tumors.  Read More

Generally speaking, it is inadvisable to eat foods containing Salmonella bacteria – especially if you’re not a fan of diarrhea, fever or abdominal cramps. In the future, however, we might be swallowing genetically-engineered versions of the little guys as a way of treating viral infections. If we do, it will be thanks to research presently being carried out at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Scientists there have reprogrammed Salmonella bacteria to act as harmless transporters of virus-stopping enzymes.  Read More

In a study that could have implications for the treatment of traumatic injuries in humans, scientists at Tufts University in Massachusetts have succeeded in getting tadpoles to regrow amputated tails. The researchers first noted that when the tails were cut off of young Xenopus laevis (African clawed frog) tadpoles, a localized increase in sodium ions occurred at the amputation site, which allowed the tail to regenerate – something which tadpoles lose the ability to do as they mature. However, after an hour of treatment with a drug cocktail that triggered an influx of sodium ions into injured cells, older tadpoles were also able to regenerate their tails. Given that tadpole tails contain spinal cord, muscle, nerves and other materials, it’s possible that the process might someday be able to regenerate the spinal cords, or even limbs, of people.  Read More

Scientists from Ohio State University (OSU) have created a nanoparticle that can deliver DNA deeply enough into a cell to allow genetic material to be activated. This is a key step in gene therapy, the “reprogramming” of defective genes. Previously, scientists have used deactivated viruses for this task, but have been limited by the body’s immune system attacking those viruses. Nanoparticle delivery is reportedly two-and-a-half to ten times more effective, because it generates much less of an immune response.  Read More

The classic nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice might need to be rewritten thanks to researchers from the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) and the Institut de la Vision in Paris. Using gene therapy, the scientists have have restored sight in mice by repairing the function of cone photoreceptors made defective by a genetic eye condition.  Read More

When English chemist John Dalton first wrote about color blindness in 1798, he must have wondered how science would improve the quality of life for people living with the condition. Today, spectacles, contact lenses and revolutionary corrective eye surgery combat the effects of a myriad of vision disorders, yet people with color blindness still live in quiet acceptance of this common genetic disorder. Now researchers have delivered promising results by successfully treating two squirrel moneys with defective color perception using a gene therapy that could also safely eradicate color blindness in humans.  Read More