Chapter #7 : Gene therapy has introduced a new way to treat cancer.
When someone have
viral infection, the immune system can work very hard to kill the infection.
Unfortunately, the immune system can't recognize cancer cells, which makes it
ineffective to defeat tumors. Steve Rosenberg from National Cancer Institute
was the first scientist to use gene therapy approach to treat patients with
cancer. He successfully manipulated the human immune cells to give it the
ability to recognize and kill cancer tumors. The author of the article, "
Gene Therapy May Bring Cancer Killing-Cells" explains that Dr. Rosenberg was
able to transfer a genetically modified T-cells to patients with cancer and succeed
in treating several patients with melanoma.
The author mentioned that Dr. Rosenberg explained that cancer cells have their
own way to evade the immune response, and by altering T-cells using gene
therapy, we can make those cells able to recognize and kill tumors. The only
problem that the article discussed regarding using this gene therapy approach is
the high costs of this kind of research.
Personally, I think
that the author poorly explained how exactly the T-cells were modified to make
it able to recognize the tumor. He also did not mention if this gene therapy
performed in T-cells will be passed through offspring or not. If I have cancer,
and I am going to pay for gene therapy treatment, I really want my second
generation to benefit from this treatment. Rather than sensationalizing people who have cancer and the public to be more interested in the research, the author could have done a better job giving accurate data on number successful and frailer cases in the study.
Resources:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5744500
http://images.1233.tw/somatic-gene-therapy/
As someone currently dealing with a cancer crisis in my family, it makes me really excited to hear that someone is working on yet another treatment for this horrible disease. It would be great if something like this could take. And you're right, it would be nice to know if the treatment can prevent the disease in later generations, especially since a family history often increases the risk of the disease.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to see how effective the gene therapy is for cancers that are environmental or contaminant based as opposed to genetically inherited ones.
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