Charlie,+Jai

Jai and Charlie’s Wikipage

Hi. we are doing gene therapy as our assignment for integrated. For those of you who don't know gene therapy is where a scientist or a doctor inserts a gene into your body to replace a defective gene. Gene therapy has the potential to save a lot of people, but its still in the testing stage.

Apparently you need something called a vector to insert the gene but, the gene cannot be injected straight into the body they have to place it in a virus. EDIT: it turns out that the “vector” is actually the virus used to carry the gene. There are different types of virus’s used to carry the gene/genes. they are:

Retroviruses - A class of viruses that can create double-stranded DNA copies of their RNA genomes. These copies of its genome can be integrated into the chromosomes of host cells. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus. Adenoviruses - A class of viruses with double-stranded DNA genomes that cause respiratory, intestinal, and eye infections in humans. The virus that causes the common cold is an adenovirus. Adeno-associated viruses - A class of small, single-stranded DNA viruses that can insert their genetic material at a specific site on chromosome 19. Herpes simplex viruses - A class of double-stranded DNA viruses that infect a particular cell type, neurons. Herpes simplex virus type 1 is a common human pathogen that causes cold sores.

I think that all these virus's are just diseases like HIV/AIDS, Herpes and apparently the common cold EDIT: according to my sources, in a way they are giving people AIDS Herpes and the common cold but the virus’s/diseases are altered so the bad part of the virus is replaced with the gene so when inserted they won’t have Herpes or AIDS they will have the gene instead There is another way to insert the genes, there are several, but I don’t understand this one yet so I’ll add it in later. Alrght I’ll go a bit of topic for a sec here. Now there ae certain things called chromosomes.they ae also sometimes called genomes. Each person has 46 of them. I don’t currently know what makes up a chromosome, though.

There is a thing called ONYX - 015. It is used in replicating tumor cells. At first, I thought this was a bad thing, but now I know that they are using the tumor cells to try and find out how fast it grows, and how it affects the area it’s in, and by doing that they can remove a gene from the tumor and insert it into someone who has that type of tumor, and it will go away.

The only things keeping gene therapy from becoming a full blown medical procedure is the fact that sometimes the genes that are injected fade or disappear somewhere, and the fact that any time anytime a foreign object is introduced into the human body, the immune system,being designed to attack the invade, attacks the gene. The risk of making something to calm down the immune system so that it doesn’t attack the gene would mean that in a way the immune system would not attack most objects, so the person would get really really sick.



Pros and Cons of Gene Therapy

Pros:

hoped to be able to cure diseases like: Parkinsons disease Alzheimers disease Huntingtons disease Type 1 Diabetes And Cancer

Cons: the immune system may destroy the vector thinking it as a foreign threat with the technology involved it will be extremly expensive. lots of people say it is cheating god.

Bibliography: www.ornl.gov

Wikipedia