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Here is my take on curing cancer from a programmers perspective. Extract a healthy strain of DNA from the patient, insert the healthy DNA into a virus that will

Here is my take on curing cancer from a programmers perspective. Extract a healthy strain of DNA from the patient, insert the healthy DNA into a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type, which will include the cancerous cells. The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA, while healthy cells get the DNA they already had. It's kinda like reformatting a hard drive. Has anyone heard of a custom treatment like this?

bithive123 15y ago
If you make enough simplifying assumptions anything is trivial.
- Jimmie 15y ago
  Kill the cancer. Leave the normal tissue alone. C'mon scientists how hard can that be. /s
  - antihero 15y ago
    Surely we could just eventually breed microscopic dogs, and, you know, train them to sniff out and destroy the cancers?
carbocation 15y ago
> The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA Human DNA, weighing in at gigabases, is too large to fit into viruses. Also, 'replacement' implies getting rid of the bad stuff, which isn't really explicitly contemplated here. Finally, if you are good enough at identifying cancer cells from the outside that you can target them for DNA replacement, you'll probably be better off by just killing that cell.
Daniel_Newby 15y ago
> ... a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type ... The trouble is that living things are basically made of fancy Jello. There is no programmable interface to say "go here".
- refurb 15y ago
  Actually, look up a company called Oncolytics. It's based around a technology that you can create viruses that only infect cancer cells. There is a lot of work going on in this area.
dagw 15y ago
As much as I hate to do this: http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/