Word: vectored
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...hardest part of all these efforts is getting the right genes into the cells that need them. Generally, the genes must be carried by some sort of delivery vehicle, which scientists call a vector. For its vector, Anderson's team used an infectious agent known as a retrovirus -- a specialized virus containing RNA (a single-strand cousin of DNA) that has a knack for finding its way to a cell's genome and making itself at home. Retroviruses can be dangerous (HIV is the most notorious), but scientists have ways of altering them so that they don't cause disease...
Selling sports stuff to people who don't need any more of it involves positioning your product as close as possible to the intersection of two powerful psychosocial forces. One is the Vector of Incompetence: if you can't hit a decent forehand or chip shot or jog half a mile without seeing spots, do you take yet another futile lesson or try once again to puff yourself into condition? No, you buy a new racquet, or set of irons, or a frightfully expensive pair of illusion-enriched running shoes...
...with colleagues Dr. R. Michael Blaese and Dr. Kenneth Culver, extracted T cells from the little girl's blood and exposed them to a mouse-leukemia retrovirus that had been rendered harmless and endowed with a normal ADA gene. Invading the T cell, the retrovirus acted as a vector, depositing its genetic material, including the ADA gene, in the cell nucleus. After the re-engineered T cells were cultured, a process that produced billions of them, they were infused back into the child's bloodstream, where their new gene began producing the ADA enzyme...
Another, more startling strategy, not yet approved, would use the AIDS virus itself as a vector to deliver antiviral genes to white blood cells infected with the AIDS virus. After incapacitating the virus so that it cannot reproduce and splicing a therapeutic gene into its genetic material, researchers would inject it into an AIDS patient's bloodstream. It could be the ideal vector for treating the disease, zeroing in on the T cells normally infected by the AIDS virus...
Other methods are more straightforward. In a forthcoming cystic fibrosis trial, Anderson says, doctors will simply "infuse the vector right down into the lungs. And there are even enemas of vectors for colon cancer...