A Cure for Colorblindness Using Gene Therapy Approach.
Using gene therapy approach, scientists at the university of Washington was successfully able to cure colorblindness in monkeys. The article "A cure for 'colorblindness' may be in sight" from the CNN news, explains that Maureen Neitz and Jay Neitz found that monkeys who suffer from color blindness are unable to differentiate between green and red color. Lookinginto their genes, they found that one of the genes that are responsible for encoding these two colors was missed. In fact, this what makes those monkey see things that are green or red relatively similar. In order to cure the monkeys, scientists replaced a new gene to the retina using a weak virus to deliver the gene. Finally, they test the monkeys and announced that their therapy was successful. Although this gene therapy was not tested in humans and the FDA did not give their permission for that, scientists gave those people suffering from colorblindness a hope for cure.
Even though the story adequately covers the most important steps in using gene therapy approach to treat diseases including how to find the faulty gene, how to deliver the corrected gene, and finally testing if the therapy actually worked, the story did not adequately covers the long term effectsof this gene therapy. One of the disadvantages of gene therapy is that the long term effects are not known. Therefore, scientists have to study the long term effects of their therapy before saying it worked on monkeys or is going to be working in humans. Another important point that the story did not mention is if this corrected gene will be passed to the second generation. If I am a colorblind person, I need to know if this therapy will affect my offspring or not before I decide to undergo this gene therapy.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=352&v=EgPMc90uXlU
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-09-20/cure-colorblindness-may-be-sight
http://genetherapyinfo.webs.com/advantages-vs-disadvantages
What I found most interesting is that fixing colorblindness just may be one of the few conditions that treatment for would be low enough in risk and complication that could make gene therapy a commonly prescribed treatment option.
ReplyDeleteI think it is so awesome that we could have a way to eliminate color blindness, I guess we will have to wait and see what the long term results of these studies reveal.
ReplyDelete