Gene Therapy – Method

Transcript

Virtually all of the developers of gene therapy have now settled on a method for injecting DNA material with the non-mutated forms of the genes that they’re treating, into cells. And that method is to use a virus. There are several different viruses or viral families that have been used for this, including retroviruses, lentiviruses, adenoviruses, and each of them have strengths and weaknesses. Some of them have more propensity to stay outside of the host genome or the host DNA. Some of them integrate into the host DNA. But one of the biggest things that is being currently worked on is making sure that there’s not a particular type of virus that causes more unintended effects, or basically that its expression can go awry and it can be overexpressed or affect the expression of other genes that are adjacent to it in the host genome.