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Regulated Gene Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 6:54 am
by Dunmann
Here's an article about a new gene therapy targeted for MS. It sounds very complicated but very interesting. Hopefully we'll see something like this come to fruition in the not too distance future.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20060209/ ... eb344333_1



Dunmann.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 8:04 am
by dignan
I guess I'll add this to the pipeline pre-clinical list...


RheoGene, Inc., announced today that it has granted a commercial license to Ichor Medical Systems for use of its RheoSwitch® Therapeutic System (RTS) in combination with Ichor Medical Systems’ proprietary TriGrid™ Delivery System electroporation technology to develop a gene therapy product for multiple sclerosis.

Genetic MS

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 10:25 am
by gwa
Doesn't this therapy indicate a genetic cause for MS? If so, I have not read about such a cause, so this is news to me.

Also, I don't see anything in the article that tells us what this therapy is supposed to do for us.


Please enlighten me.

gwa

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:06 am
by raven
The therapy doesn't indicate a genetic cause for MS, although there is a genetic susceptibility. Genes in the human body control the production of proteins. By causing a gene to overexpress the production of a natural protein can be increased. Ichor medical are looking at causing the body to express higher levels of interferon beta.
Among therapeutic protein programs, Ichor is developing a dramatically improved treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. The current standard of care for MS is treatment with recombinant interferon beta (rIFN-β) protein wherein patients must be injected multiple times a week and suffer side effects from high interferon levels following treatment. Ichor believes that its TDS / IFN-β therapy will provide several advantages to MS patients, such as once every three months dosing, a more constant level of the protein, thereby reducing side effects, and allow possible combination use with other MS drugs due to the reduced cost of TDS / DNA drug treatment compared to recombinant protein therapies.
If they can bring it to market it should be a step forward.

Robin