Gene Therapy for the Blind

As a parent of two children when I read about some of the horrible diseases out there that can affect children and on in to adulthood I find that the world sometimes can be a scary place.

So it is nice to read an article on a horrible disease that scientists are working to cure or at least alleviate the problems of this disease.

The disease is Leber's congenital amaurosis. Basically as a child gets older their eyesight degenerates and will be blind by their 20s. I couldn't imagine if my children had this disease.

Here is the article that first brought this science exploration to my attention through Google News.

The treatment involves gene modification. Years ago there were a lot of debates on the ethics of gene modification therapy. It was noted in other places that this kind of debate ceased in the popular media when the procedures yielded results that will actually cure children's diseases.

There are dangers with this treatment. It is a technology that is still in its infancy. There is an incident mentioned in this article about two children who underwent a similar surgery being infected by the carrier virus and developing cancer. One hopes they are using a different carrier virus and that this is in fact the cause of the cancer.

Right now, modeling the human body well enough for computer simulations to map out how these operations will affect the human body are not possible. Until then human trials will be necessary to determine the efficacy of a procedure.

One can only hope that the scientists need a minimum of iterations to determine the correct methodology.

Here are some additional articles on this subject in the news:
Docs Perform Gene Therapy Operations
Hope in Sight
eCanadaNow

This is my 100th blog entry.