Low Cost Biotechnologies can be Inconvenienced but not Halted by Regulators

The coming era of gene therapies will be considerably more distributed and bottom-up than the advent of stem cell therapies. This will be a dynamic industry in which many small groups compete to set up distribution of mail order kits and clinics to provide widespread access to therapies. Regulators will attempt to suppress all of this, and will largely fail, as money talks and many regions will choose to host the businesses that offer gene therapies. This will come to pass because gene therapy technologies are many times cheaper, more easily managed, and capable of centralization and mass production than stem cell technologies. You might look at how medical tourism for stem cells progressed over the past twenty years, and expect the gene therapy industry to grow many times faster once the spark is lit. It will also be far more accessible to members of the public in its earlier stages: cost of the product drives the character of an industry. There are several very promising targets for the first gene therapies, the best of which, in my opinion, are follistatin and myostatin, which control muscle growth, and are well studied. There are even a few natural human myostatin mutants, to accompany the many well-muscled myostatin mutants in other mammalian species, both natural and engineered. A number of other genes will be targeted in the first years of the industry, such as those that can dramatically lower blood cholesterol, and which also either have thriving human mutants...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs