Will Gene Therapy Cure Cancer?

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• published: 21 Aug 2013
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Gene therapy, an alteration of genes within the body to fight or prevent disease, has sparked a revolution in cancer treatment. Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in the United States, and the two main ways we treat it - radiation and chemotherapy - have severe side effects. In this episode of Fw:Thinking, Jonathan Strickland walks us through the process of human gene therapy, reveals it's exciting potential, and questions the ethics of genetic modification and altering DNA. We have a question for you! If you were a gene hacker, what crazy genetic mutation would you give yourself? Leave us a comment with your answer! -------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to Fw:Thinking: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=fwthinking For the audio podcast, blog and more, visit the Fw:Thinking website: http://www.fwthinking.com Fw:Thinking on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fwthinking Jonathan Stickland on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jonstrickland Fw:Thinking on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FWThinking01 Fw:Thinking on Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108500616405453822675/ [TRANSCRIPT]: Feeling under the weather? Just tweak a chromosome and you'll be all better. Gene therapy. Now I'm not talking about support groups for people who can't fit into the same pants they wore in high school. I'm talking about the alteration of genes within the body to treat disease. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, and the two main ways we treat it are with radiation and chemotherapy. Both of which have severe side effects. Chemotherapy in particular can be devastating to healthy cells. So gene therapy has the promise of perhaps complimenting or maybe even replacing these other therapies. Currently there are a few different ways to use gene therapy to battle cancer. One way is just to remove the mutated genetic material and replace it with healthy material. Kind of like replacing a flat tire. Another way is to insert special genes into white blood cells. Now this gives those white blood cells the chance to detect and battle tumors. It's like giving a cancer cop a strong pot of coffee and a detailed sketch of what the bad cells look like. But the third, and this is my own personal favorite, is that cells happen to have a little self-destruct button inside them. Now this button gets pressed if there's too much mutation within that cell. But in cancer cells the button is deactivated. So with gene therapy you go in and reactivate that button. Press the button, no more cancer cell. But this raises a question. How do we actually get that genetic material into cells in the first place? Well, do you like spy movies? Because that's what we're talking about here - double agents! In this case, the double agent is a virus. Now normally a virus might be out there to kill you. But what scientists are doing is they're scooping the DNA out of viruses and putting a treatment gene into it, and then putting that into a patient's body. So, like a double agent, the virus works for our team now. In our spy movie, the viruses smuggle in the good genes, so when the cell replicates the good gene is copied instead of the mutated one. Take for example a cancer cell. Once inside the spy virus can deliver the gene that will halt its rampant replication. One such gene is called oligonucleotide. A single stranded piece of DNA that inserts itself directly in the slots of the mutated cell's double helix DNA, essentially jamming up the cell's replicating gears. The mutated segment of DNA can not be transcribed or copied once you've jammed up those gears. And in fact, scientists may one day be able to reverse this process, turning cancer cells back into healthy cells through cellular espionage. So far gene therapy has been used to treat very simple diseases and conditions where a gene is essentially flipped on or off and that effects everything else. Think of it like one of those strands of lights where one light is wrong and therefore the whole thing won't work. You know, kind of like these that I had back in college. Really you just have to find the one bulb that's wrong and fix it and it all comes on again! But some conditions are a little more complicated, and they actually involve lots of different combinations of genes that maybe switched on or off and so we have to determine what that combination is in order to use gene therapy to solve it. We're talking about over 20,000 proteins. This is a big problem. But as genetic information becomes easier for us to obtain, this raises some new questions. For example, should parents be able to determine what their child's eye color should be? Or height? Or sexual orientation? And if we're able to use gene therapy to cure or combat diseases and conditions, does that drastically alter our lifespan and in turn does that drastically alter world population?