{"id":130385,"date":"2021-11-11T00:23:38","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T08:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/surprise-our-bodies-have-been-hiding-a-trojan-horse-for-gene-therapy"},"modified":"2021-11-11T00:23:38","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T08:23:38","slug":"surprise-our-bodies-have-been-hiding-a-trojan-horse-for-gene-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/surprise-our-bodies-have-been-hiding-a-trojan-horse-for-gene-therapy","title":{"rendered":"Surprise! Our Bodies Have Been Hiding a Trojan Horse for Gene Therapy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/nAVFFqDiIi0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The problem? Our bodies aren\u2019t big fans of foreign substances\u2014particularly ones that trigger an undesirable immune response. What\u2019s more, these delivery systems aren\u2019t great with biological zip codes, often swarming the entire body instead of focusing on the treatment area. These \u201cdelivery problems\u201d are half the battle for effective genetic medicine with few side effects.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe biomedical community has been developing powerful molecular therapeutics, but delivering them to cells in a precise and efficient way is challenging,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/925321\">said<\/a> Zhang at the Broad Institute, the McGovern Institute, and MIT.<\/p>\n<p>Enter SEND. The new delivery platform, <a href=\"https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/373\/6557\/882\">described in<\/a> <i>Science<\/i>, dazzles with its sheer ingenuity. Rather than relying on foreign carriers, SEND (<b>s<\/b>elective <b>e <\/b>ndogenous e <b>n <\/b>capsidation for cellular <b>d<\/b>elivery) commandeers human proteins to make delivery vehicles that shuttle in new genetic elements. In a series of tests, the team embedded RNA cargo and CRISPR components inside cultured cells in a dish. The cells, acting as packing factories, used human proteins to encapsulate the genetic material, forming tiny balloon-like vessels that can be collected as a treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The problem? Our bodies aren\u2019t big fans of foreign substances\u2014particularly ones that trigger an undesirable immune response. What\u2019s more, these delivery systems aren\u2019t great with biological zip codes, often swarming the entire body instead of focusing on the treatment area. These \u201cdelivery problems\u201d are half the battle for effective genetic medicine with few side effects. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}