{"id":33094,"date":"2016-12-31T21:47:21","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T05:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/gene-therapy-is-here-and-it-could-radically-change-modern-medicine"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:54:39","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T20:54:39","slug":"gene-therapy-is-here-and-it-could-radically-change-modern-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/gene-therapy-is-here-and-it-could-radically-change-modern-medicine","title":{"rendered":"Gene therapy is here, and it could radically change modern medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For a few lucky patients, 2016 was the year when gene therapy turned from promises to cures. The technology, long contemplated as a way to erase disease by revising people\u2019s DNA, made big advances and began turning into a real business offering some of the world\u2019s most expensive and revolutionary medicines.<\/p>\n

So what is gene therapy, anyway? The US Food and Drug Administration says it\u2019s any treatment in which a replacement gene is added to a person\u2019s body or a disease-causing one is inactivated. That\u2019s usually done by adding\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad new instructions to cells via billions of viruses stuffed with correct DNA strands.<\/p>\n

It sounds complicated, and it is. Gene therapy was first tested in a person in 1990, but scary side effects turned the gene-fix idea into a scientific backwater. And the field hasn\u2019t conquered all its problems. We started the year with the tale of Glybera<\/a>, heralded as the first gene treatment ever approved that sought to correct an inherited gene error. Yet the drug came with an eye-popping price tag of $1 million and, dogged by questions over how well it works, has turned into a medical and commercial flop.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a few lucky patients, 2016 was the year when gene therapy turned from promises to cures. The technology, long contemplated as a way to erase disease by revising people\u2019s DNA, made big advances and began turning into a real business offering some of the world\u2019s most expensive and revolutionary medicines. So what is gene [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33094","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\/413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33094"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65455,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33094\/revisions\/65455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}