Gene Therapy...

[NobleSavage]

I thought this was something 20 years off, but we are already doing lots of clinical trials. http://www.abedia.com/wiley/genes.php

Is there a good resource that summaries the findings for a layman?

 

[dystopian]

Uhm...

It's not just that we're 'already' doing trials. We've in fact been doing active gene therapy since 1990. So, rather than thinking it's 20 years off, you're actually about 25 years behind; although of course it's only now becoming more widespread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy?

 

[NobleSavage]

Uhm...

It's not just that we're 'already' doing trials. We've in fact been doing active gene therapy since 1990. So, rather than thinking it's 20 years off, you're actually about 25 years behind; although of course it's only now becoming more widespread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy?

Yeah, I remember it was getting a lot of attention around 1990, even Newt Gingrich was talking about it. Then there were problems, or expectations were too high, or something threw cold water onto the early media hype and it kinda fell off my radar. It is the number of trials being conducted currently that surprised me: 2412.

 

[J842P]

Well, some of early experimental treatments resulted in the patients getting leukemia when they were targeting some genetic immunodeficiency, and it actually worked for 9/10 of the patients. Unfortunately, 3 of them got leukemia as a result. Essentially, the gene insertions were random and in some cases caused mutations that resulted in cancer.

There has been a lot of breakthroughs in targeted insertion in the last couple of decades, so for at least some forms of gene therapy there are a lot of potential avenues opening up.