The future has arrived, complete wit hope for curing the incurable disease of yesterday. According to labspaces.net, scientists in Buffalo, Cleveland, and Oklahoma City have successfully used a form of gene therapy to cure blindness. To be specific, the scientists used their gene therapy cure to “improve and save the sight of mice with retinitis pigmentosa,” which is a disease that can lead to blindness. While there are certainly other causes of blindness, which this technique will not conclusively cure, this is most certainly a step in the right direction.
The type of gene therapy used in the cure is notable because it was not the traditional viral form of gene therapy. Instead, a synthetic, nanoparticle carrier was used in the cure. This new compacted DNA nanoparticle technique will hopefully lead to cures for retinitis pigmentosa in humans, as well as “other inherited and acquired retinal diseases.” The cure also required certain prior knowledge, which may limit the applications of the nanoparticle carrier method in humans, as it is necessary to already have studied a particular disorder to a stage at which one can identify the unhealthy gene, and be able to instead use a healthy gene. But in the case of retinitis pigmentosa, scientists do have knowledge of those genes, and were able to use the nanoparticle carrier cure to successfully implant the healthy gene into mice who originally suffered from the disease. These mice definitively showed evidence of the cure’s effect upon them, as they showed significant signs of healing in no time.
Furthermore, the cure appeared to have no harmful secondary side effects. The nanoparticle carrier technique seemed to cure the disease in the mice, leading to their recovery from whatever ill effects they had suffered so far, with no ill side effects. The scientists involved have become confident that their technologies will allow for the use of these seemingly miraculous cures all throughout the world. This disease, which previously had no cure, now stands defeated by scientists’ ingenuity.
There are moral issues attached to the use of gene therapy, true, but it seems that no one could have any issue with this kind of cure. It is hard to believe a blind person refusing to undergo such a harmless and non-dangerous cure if it would mean that he or she would then be able to see again. Indeed, if this kind of cure were capable of being implemented in a widespread fashion, then the world could change drastically. There is still no word on exactly how much this kind of cure would cost to implement in any given instance, however, so though it may soon become available as a very useful and powerful tool in medicine, it may not be initially as available as we might like.
Nonetheless, news like this brings hope for the future. As new techniques like this are developed, we move closer and closer towards a world in which all the major diseases, disorders, and problems of yesterday have been cured, and are forgotten as anything other than history