Lindsay Adams
Abstract
It has been proposed that gene therapy could yield to future treatment of cancers and other diseases and genetic disorders. Various literature sites have expressed that gene therapy is currently only used in research studies, and is still very young and unpredictable in clinical studies. Gene therapy has become more and more applicable to current and future medical studies concerning the treatment of cancer. The reviewed literature has shown that researchers and scientists firmly believe in the promise of gene therapy, and that it could indeed hold the cures for many diseases and the tools to prevent them. The reviewed literature has revealed that gene therapy has been very successful in many experimental trials with animals and models, but is not yet ready for human clinical trials because of the unpredictability of side effects and problems that have occurred in early studies. In the future, the literature has suggested the possible development of a cancer vaccine in addition to individualized chemotherapy and gene targeting in patients. It is the hopes of all that gene therapeutic methods will be used in the future to treat cancer and further its predictability and prevention.
Literature Review
Genes, or the specific order of nucleotides on a segment of DNA that encode the instructions for making proteins, are the basic operative units of heredity (Peault et al. 2007). Throughout the recent years of genomics through the Human Genome Project, researchers have identified all of the genes in the human genome. Located on the chromosomes, genes are the keys to revealing the genotypes and phenotypes of all living things. When they are mutated, inactive, or altered, the encoded proteins cannot continue with their conventional functions, and genetic disorders are often developed (Peault et al. 2007). Current research is underway to determine the functions of these genes. Once
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