Gene Therapy: A Medical Revolution
Gene therapy is the process of editing, modifying or treating genes and chromosomes in the body. The way genes and chromosomes are treated with gene therapy spans a wide field. But however, the following shows some of the currently working gene therapies in use.
The Use of Nanomedicine
Aids the development of treatments for cancer. In a primary sense, nanotechnology is the manipulation and creation of things on a very small scale, so with this in mind, the idea is to create a “nano-torpedo”, which could carry healthy genes and put them in an organism to fix the faulty genes. A combination of nanotechnology with gene therapy provided a treatment to torpedo cancer in March 2009. In London, researchers are testing a treatment in mice, which helps to deliver genes covered in nanoparticles, so that they can target and destroy hard-to-reach cancer cells in the body. Just as nanomedicine can be combined with gene therapy to yield in treatments, personalized cancer therapy can also help.Gene therapy can be used in a thorough way to produce
Customized Cancer Therapies
Gene therapy can be used in a thorough way to produce personalized medicine when being used as a treatment. Gene therapy also permits scientists and researchers to be capable of pinpointing specific tumors on individual patients. Since everyone has a different genome, each individual would receive a specialized gene therapy and with this, hospitals can be able to amplify point mutations in DNA sequences. Molecular pathologist John Lafrate summarizes the different potential of gene therapy to be capable of personalizing medicine, saying "In the next few years, I think every major cancer center is going to work on this approach".
While certain treatments are becoming personalized, eye disease is coming to find a cure with gene therapy. A little while back, scientists were able to make a shocking discovery that enzymes called Dicer enzymes are able to cut double stranded RNA molecules into tinier pieces that before; they are quite necessary for gene-silencing pathways involving the use of small RNAs and if it weren’t for the Dicer enzymes, the RNA wouldn’t be synthesized. Scientists have experimented that increasing the levels of the Dicer enzyme and then injecting the Alu RNA sequences helps to restore eye vision in animals. As gene therapy has been in use in many different treatments, some examples include gene therapy for metastatic melanoma, treatments for color blindness, gene therapy for inherited blindness, and gene therapy combined with nano particle treatment for cancer.
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