Using Viruses to Treat Disease

In the modern age of health care, there is a drug for just about everything. However, if you suffer from a genetic disease, the treatment options may not be as bright. Unlike treating someone's symptoms with a drug, how do you change someone's genetic makeup. One answer: gene therapy. Still in its infancy, gene therapy is the insertion of genes into an individual's cells to treat a disease.

For example, sickle cell anemia is a genetic disorder in which the hemoglobin in your blood is defective, causing the cell to have a different shape and not carry oxygen as well. But if the DNA in the bone marrow could be replaced with functional DNA, then the bone marrow would produce fully functional red blood cells and the patient would be cured. This is the potential of gene therapy. But how is this replacement performed? In tissue culture, this process can be accomplished relatively easily, using chemicals which can fuse with the cellular membrane releasing encapsulated DNA into the cell, but changing the DNA of a person is much more difficult bd donation. To accomplish this task, scientists use viruses to target specific organs and then deliver a specific gene directly into the target cell, where it can be used by the host to produce the correct protein or be incorporated directly into the genome permanently. So how does this work?

Unlike bacteria, viruses are extracellular parasites. Bacteria are free living organisms capable of living and replicating on their own outside of a human host. While a virus is simply a capsule of genetic material (DNA or RNA) covered in a protein coat bd donation. They do not contain the enzymes or machinery to perform any metabolism outside of their host cell. Because of this tight relationship, it is very difficult to produce antibiotics that affect the virus but not the cell. So when a virus comes in contact with its host cell, it is taken up by the cell whereupon the virus takes over control of the cellular machinery and redirects its resources for normal activity to the production of new viruses donation bd. With the completion of this cycle, the newly formed viruses are released from the cell back into the body to search out a new host. During this process, if the host cell does not spontaneously die, the virus will kill it.