3 ms·

Actually, 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

• tsol 5y ago
  We 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 ago
  As someone with some genetic diseases, it’s feels unfortunate to be born too early
• ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Huntington'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 ago
  We 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.