Word: infections
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Some researchers look forward to the day when gene therapy is used to repair damaged genes. With the new vectors, they would infect cells with small molecules that combine DNA and RNA. These hybrid molecules would seek out and bind to the defective gene, enabling it to function normally. "It would be like a repair mechanism," Wilson explains, "rather than a replacement...
...other new vector is being fashioned by Salk's Verma. "What we want," he says, "is a virus that is easy to make, that delivers genes at very high efficiency, that can infect a nondividing cell and that enables its therapeutic gene to become part and parcel of the chromosome...
Seeking the best candidate, Verma zeroed in on the most notorious of the retroviruses--HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He eliminated the protein envelope that allows the virus entry into T cells, substituted one enabling it to infect a greater variety of cells, and removed the six genes that make the virus dangerous...
...When he taught his undergraduate course, he really hoped to infect people with a desire to change the world," Kieffer said...
...amino acids that make up its outer shell and thus forcing the body to churn out millions of new antibodies, all of which may become ineffective with the next mutation. Some parts of the virus don't change, however; if they did, HIV would rapidly lose its power to infect. If scientists understood more about those parts, they could use them as the basis for designing new drugs...