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Re:Gene Therapy Makes Near-Blind Patients See by Strengtheni... by dekhn on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @09:14PM (#10045461)
I can see gene therapy making significant progress in the next decade on diseases for which gene therapy can be effective, but there are some serious problems. you still have to get the therapy to the cells that need it; the delivery problem is hard. Further, it's not certain that you can easily identify which "patch" (to the extent the idea of patching the genome is actually a valid one) is going to work in an individual.

I woudl say that we will see the end of some genetic diseases, similar ot the way that vaccines reduced the incidence of some diseases. Other diseases, especially complex, multifactorial ones, we simply don't have the theory to understand their mechanism, and in general, you need to have some amount of mechanistic understanding to come up with therapies.

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