Talley must invent a compound that gums up the action of bad genes and their proteins.
"Good genes" are no help if they are silenced, and "bad genes" don't pose much threat if they are not expressed.
That could be a limitation if you need to turn of dozens of bad genes at once to turn off cancer.
They have so much genetic damage that it may be impossible to safely destroy them with drug that hit just one or two bad genes.
Ever so slowly researchers are beginning to identify some of the molecular and cellular triggers of depression, including stress hormones run amok and bad genes.
On the basis of this discovery, DeCode recently began human trials of an old asthma drug that counteracts the bad genes, hoping this will slash heart attack risk.
Ultimately the drugs may even be able to prevent the disease from striking people at high risk because of a family history of diabetes or bad genes.
We wrote about the vaccine two years ago as an early example of new personalized cancer treatments moving through trials that will target only the patients whose tumors have the bad genes.
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The causes are not known but probably include a combination of inherited bad genes, bad diet (too much fat and red meat, too few vegetables) and random genetic errors that occur as cells divide.
They include compounds that block bad genes responsible for spreading cancer into the bones, chemicals that prompt prostate cancer cells to destroy themselves and vaccines that train the body's killer T-cells to seek and destroy tumor cells.
But just because this population is an ideal place to mine for bad genes doesn't mean those genes will be found, or that once they are found they will lead to valuable drugs or even genetic tests.
It will last 18 months and include roughly 2, 500 patients, including both those with the bad genes and others who don't have the bad genes but are at very high risk of heart attacks for other reasons.
Determining which targeted agents to test on which patients is still a matter of educated guesswork: There are so many bad genes involved that researchers are only beginning to determine which are the most crucial to hit.
They include compounds that block bad genes responsible for spreading cancer into the bones, chemicals that prompt prostate cancer cells to destroy themselves and vaccines that train the body's killer T cells to seek and destroy tumor cells.
By searching through patient tumor samples for mutations in these genes, researchers may be able to vastly accelerate the long and expensive clinical testing process by testing new drugs only in patients whose tumors contain the bad genes.
Genes bad for organisms are supposed to die out, not spread.
People who are unlucky enough to inherit the bad version of both genes have a thirtyfold-higher risk of macular degeneration, says University of Utah geneticist Kang Zhang, who helped nail down the second gene after Yale University researchers first spotted it.
People who are unlucky enough to inherit the bad version of both genes have a thirtyfold higher risk of macular degeneration, says University of Utah geneticist Kang Zhang, who helped nail down the second gene after Yale University researchers first spotted it.
Such ills are caused by a complex stew of dozens of genes, as well as bad diet and other environmental factors, such as smoking.
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