RUNNING THE RED LIGHT

摘要

On 28 November, two patients in an Israeli hospital downed a vanilla-flavoured shake in the hope of curing their cystic fibrosis. The drug in the shake is meant to get their cells to ignore the genetic mutation that makes their lives a misery. Remarkably, if this trial works, the very same drug might be used to help patients with a huge range of genetic diseases. At the moment treatments for cystic fibrosis concentrate on the conditions symptoms, such as lung-clogging mucus, rather than its underlying cause — a faulty gene. Advocates of gene therapy aim to correct this by delivering working copies of the cystic fibrosis gene to a patient's cells, but results have been mixed so far.