The Scientist on BioViva's Initial Test of Human Gene Therapies

The Scientist has published a measured piece on the first results from BioViva's initial test of human gene therapy, telomerase and follistatin overexpression, and the broader context in which this single person test took place. The results indicate that the telomerase gene therapy most likely worked in the sense of delivering telomerase to a significant number of cells, including the immune cells used to measure average telomere length. That is an important thing to validate up front, before thinking about any sort of other outcomes, or expanding to a trial of some sort. Historically, gene therapies have proven to be highly varied in their effectiveness when it comes to uptake in target cells: in animal studies, the result might be 5% uptake, or it might be 60% uptake, or anywhere in between. A lot of work has gone into trying to make things more reliable over the past decade, but for many years yet there will be questions as to whether any particular formulation works well enough to build upon. That said, the error bars are large in these measurements, and further data is definitely called for. First Data from Anti-Aging Gene Therapy Last year, Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of Seattle-based biotech firm BioViva, hopped a plane to Colombia, where she received multiple injections of two experimental gene therapies her company had developed. One is intended to lengthen the caps of her chromosomes (called telomeres) while the other aims to increase muscle mass. The...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs