The Old-Fashioned Approach to Delivery and Targeting of Gene Therapy for Arthritis

Sometimes the old-fashioned, simple solution is more than sufficient for the task at hand. In today's open access review paper, researchers discuss the delivery and targeting of gene therapies to arthritic joint tissue via the simple expedient of injecting the therapeutic into the joint - the most modern of medical treatments married to a 150-year-old technology. And why not? The alternatives for targeting a therapy to a specific tissue are numerous, but all quite complicated and expensive: magnetic fields to guide metallic nanoparticles attached to the therapeutic; using seeker proteins that preferentially match the surface structure of a given cell type; DNA machinery that checks the internal state of a cell and only triggers the therapeutic if the local environment appears correct; and so forth. First generation gene therapies are appearing in clinical trials in ever larger numbers, hundreds in recent years, though the term covers a wide range of what are arguably quite distinct approaches and endpoints. Very few of these use CRISPR today; most are older delivery technologies working their way through the last portions of a years-long development pipeline. That story will likely be very different a couple of years from now, given the enthusiasm with which the research community has embraced CRISPR. Today's candidate gene therapies largely have effects that are temporary, as the delivery mechanisms don't successfully transfer their cargo into a large number of cells....
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs