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Gene Therapy

Gene therapy is basically the placing of one’s genes into another individual’s cells and tissues in order to help treat the disease. Usually it is a heredity disease that plagues the flawed, but still typical individual. Gene therapy is continually becoming a rapidly growing field of medical research where genes again are introduced into the body to treat diseases.
Genes are our heredity and provide the biological and genetic code for a particular cell and determine its function. The therapy then provides the genes that correct and displace the disease-controlling functions of cells that are not, in essence, doing their job.
There are mainly two types of gene therapy cells, somatic and germline. They either transform somatic cells, the cells of the body, or cells of the germlines, better known as sex cells. More people would prefer the gene therapy directed toward the somatic cells, because aiming toward the germline cells are unknown and controversial.
In most gene therapy studies, a "corrected" gene is inserted into the genome to replace an "abnormal," disease-causing gene. A carrier called a vector must be used to deliver the therapeutic gene to the patient's target cells. Target cells such as the person’s liver or lung cells are “infected” by the vector. The vector then unloads its genetic material containing the human gene into the target cell. The generation of a functional protein product from the curative gene restores the target cell to a normal state, which is the basic process.
There are many factors that keep gene therapy from becoming an effective treatment for genetic disease. There is the short lived nature of gene therapy where before the therapy can become a permanent existence cure in the person’s body, the therapeutic genes or DNA must remain functional and the cells that was treated by the therapy must be long lived and stable. So caution and research of the patient and the genes is...