Gene Therapy

[Joe]

I've seen a few articles recently on the study of gene therapy in treating cancer. From what I've read, the results were very promising in mice and clinical traials have already started.

Has anyone seen any recent information as to how the studies are going and what stage the trials are in?

[john]

I did a search on clinicaltrials.gov for "gene therapy", cancer and the query came up with 25 trials. There are 111 vaccine trials

p53 vaccines look fairly good. There is some research that suggests a "broad" spectrum type vaccine will be getter than a single target.

Kind of like a combo chemo may be better than a single chemo. The different chemos attack different ways the tumor grows. It may be important to attack multiple protiens.

Remember the hardest part about fighting cancer is that cancer cells are essentially our own cells with the same ability to defend themselves. So if they are attacked by chemo/radiation they find ways to survive, just like our normal cells.

And since cancer is similar to normal cells it is hard to find a way to attack only the cancer - thus chemo (which attacks healthy and normal cells) is the current treatment

RNA interference was named as the greatest breakthrough for genetic research by MIT, I believe. We may be seeing RNA interference based drugs in a few years

The Human Genenome has been decoded, the next biggest hurdle is how these genes express themselves or in other words turn on/off protiens.

This is the field of proteomics. Which is more complicated than the genenome.

There does seem to be a lot of progress.