Word: dr
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...world. These numbers reflect a growing optimism that gene therapy, a medical discipline that emerged with great fanfare in the early 1990s but fell out of favor during its adolescence, is finally coming of age. "Twenty years from now gene therapy will have revolutionized the practice of medicine," predicts Dr. W. French Anderson, director of gene therapy at the University of Southern California medical school, who is perhaps the most outspoken champion of this slowly maturing medical art. "Virtually every disease will have gene therapy as one of its treatments...
...could the same be done directly to cells within the human body? "That's where we hit the wall in the early 1990s," recalls Dr. James Wilson, director of the Institute for Human Gene Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. One problem was that the body's immune system regarded the viral carriers as foreign invaders, and its response caused inflammation and swelling at the injection site. The antibodies that developed in response to the virus caused further difficulties. "In a very unfortunate turn of events," Wilson explains, "the patients would become immune against the therapy...
Floyd Stokes, recovered, vigorous and hard at work on his Texas ranch last week, needs no convincing. "Dr. Isner and these fellows had to do some really far-out thinking to come up with this treatment," he says. "I owe my life to them...
...seemed. "We banged our heads against the wall for 10 years," says Dr. Alan Oliff, head of cancer research at Merck. "We were on the verge of abandoning the project." Then Oliff's team realized something critical: the ras protein can't do its job until it has been activated by another enzyme called a farnesyl transferase. Maybe that would make a better target? Early word is that it does, but Merck won't publish the findings from its first human trials until sometime next year...
...thing, the body's own immune system often attacks the anti-sense DNA, mistaking it as a potentially harmful virus. For another, many cells in the body don't allow the anti-sense molecules to cross their membranes. "Nine years ago, everyone thought, wow, this is dynamite," says Dr. Art Krieg, editor of the journal Anti-Sense and Nucleic Acid Drug Development. "Then they ran into technical hurdles, and the pendulum swung the other way." Now, says Krieg, a few anti-sense compounds are starting to show promise. Among them is a drug called Vitravene, which was approved...