Giving Genetic Disease the Finger
mmonnin
Centreville, VA
So called "Zinc fingers" are inserted into human cells where they attached to damaged DNA and triggers the body's natural repair mechanism to fix the damaged area.
Source: Wired
This could have some very practical uses!Scientists are closing in on techniques that could let them safely repair almost any defective gene in a patient, opening the door for the first time to treatments for a range of genetic disorders that are now considered incurable.
The breakthrough, announced in the journal Nature in June, relies on so-called zinc fingers, named after wispy amino acid protuberances that emanate from a single zinc ion. When inserted into human cells, the fingers automatically bind to miscoded strands of DNA, spurring the body's innate repair mechanism to recode the problem area with the correct gene sequence.
"This doesn't just deliver a foreign gene into the cell," said Nobel Prize winner and CalTech President David Baltimore, who with a Sangamo paper co-author Mathew Porteus proposed this method to cure genetic diseases. "It actually deletes the miscoded portion and fixes the problem."
Source: Wired
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