More about gene therapy..
Interesting data:
By GARDINER HARRIS; Published: March 3, 2005
The French study was once hailed as one of the first breakthroughs in gene therapy: 10 children suffering from a rare immune disorder were largely cured. But three of those children have since developed leukemia, and one of the three has died.
For years, gene therapy was heralded as a technology that would soon yield blockbuster drug innovations. The National Institutes of Health issued thousands of grants to pursue the research, hundreds of patents have been granted on the technology, and more than 150 biotechnology companies have been created in the last 15 years to exploit it. In 1997 alone, the peak year, 24 such companies were created, said Dr. Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University.
Gene therapy’s disappointing history is mirrored in other medical technologies once highly promoted, like high-throughput chemical screening and the decoding of the human genome. Reaping the fruits of such technological advances is taking much longer than executives in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals once suggested. As a result, the industries are suffering a drought of new products and are trying to explain why their laboratories have burned through so much money in recent years with so little to show for it.
Many of the companies established since 1990 to pursue gene therapy work have since shifted to other technologies. Cell Genesys, in South San Francisco, Calif., once focused entirely on gene therapy, but in 2001 it spun off much such research into privately held Ceregene, based in San Diego.
“We’re just a cancer company now,” said Ina Cu, a Cell Genesys spokeswoman.
Despite the problems, gene therapy is still routinely heralded as the next big thing, and the field’s researchers get a bit defensive when discussing the many problems that have plagued it. But several top researchers agreed in interviews that much of the early optimism had been wrongheaded and that marketable cures were years away.
Read all the article @ NY Times here.
Dr. Raif Geha, (website) Chief of Immunology at Children’s Hospital Boston told me about 2 weeks ago that ten more years are needed to make gene therapy available and once he does that he will move to the caribbean..