"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".
...yet
Wonder if we'll look back at this and think "how quaint".
Just look at the current list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Treatment_of_gene...
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.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/octopuse...
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.
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.