4 ms·
"Because while it’s important to show that mice born without MTDH are resistant to cancer, that doesn’t help patients, whose genes can’t be rewritten." ...yet
by nielsbot 5y ago
"Because while it’s important to show that mice born without MTDH are resistant to cancer, that doesn’t help patients, whose genes can’t be rewritten."
...yet
Wonder if we'll look back at this and think "how quaint".
- csdvrx 5y agoActually, we can: I think we already have working gene therapy for several diseases. Just look at the current list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Treatment_of_genetic_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Treatment_of_gene...
- tsol 5y agoWe don't have the capability to turn off a single gene in all living cells in a body. We have some applications of gene therapy, but they're very specific to the disease they're treating
- moneywoes 5y agoAs someone with some genetic diseases, it’s feels unfortunate to be born too early
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoHuntington's is an invariably fatal disease, which is caused by the repetition of a single gene, which overexpresses a single protein. It's about as simple as genetics get. When we've cured that, I'll say we have working gene therapy.
- yazaddaruvala 5y agoWe don’t have a good enough delivery mechanism to get it to 99.99%+ of cells. So how well a gene therapy is really depends on how many of the cells need to be targeted. For example, increasing muscle mass is beneficial even if it hits only 25% of cells. It can also be injected directly into each large muscle group. Or specifically targeted. Meanwhile, trying to target pancreatic cancer is really hard given it’s location, and depends on if the “bad proteins” would be transported by blood to the pancreas anyways and/or if even 0.01% of cells creating the protein is enough to sustain the problem.
- The_rationalist 5y agoEpigenetics are very easy to alter with peptides
- thornjm 5y agoNeo: “Are you trying to tell me that I can alter DNA?” Morpheus: “no Neo, I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready you won’t have to” Altering the DNA is unnecessary if you can control the expression of genes or add additional genetic material later in the DNA->RNA->protein process. mRNA vaccines are already a great example of this. Another example might be the cystic fibrosis therapy Trikafta.
- nielsbot 5y agoNearly a Trifakta
- adolph 5y agooctopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/octopuses-do-something-really-strange-to-their-genes/522024/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/octopuse...
- roscoebeezie 5y agoDisclaimer: I’m not a scientist, but I want to be. For things like cancer cells which from a cell surface perspective, can look a lot like healthy cells, I don’t know how one only modifies DNA/RNA expression in only cancer cells. It would have to be all cells with maybe some cellular diagnosis logic in the DNA/RNA itself. Even then cancer evolves. It would have to done multiple times with something like cell descendents information.
- thornjm 5y agoTargeting doesn’t have to occur at the cell surface does it? Perhaps something like introducing tumour suppressor genes to every cell. They’ll have no effect on healthy cells yet detect “badness” in cancerous cells and terminate them.