what is gene therapy?

how does it serves to work for cancers?

what is gene therapy?

how does it serves to work for cancers?

 

Hello icepeaks635,

 

The info provided by this link (i.e., simply copy and paste) http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Therapy/gene - into your browser address bar ought to answer most, if not all, of your questions.

 

Best wishes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy This gives agood general overview of the technique.

 

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Cancerinformation/Cancertreatment/Treatmenttypes/Biologicaltherapies/Genetherapy.aspx This gives some information regarding the cancer side of things.

 

Doing so further reading, it seems the idea is to add genes to cancer cells that make them suseptiable to certain compounds. Alternatively, the damaged portion of the genes that actually cause the cancer could be replaced with the healthy version of it. So far, this is rather experimental for cancer and so while be a fair few years before this is widely used.

 

Gene therapy is used in the treatment of cystic fibrosis where patients inhale a vector containg the healthy version of the gene which then replace the faulty ones of the patients airways.

Gene therapy is a good idea. But how to transfer gens to every cells is a big problem. We have many cells in our body. Ideal gen transfer is to fix all cells in our body. Using virus is one of the methods, but it has safety problems. We need more research about developing efficient and safe gene transfer method.