quote:
Originally posted by roro:
why would ANYONE voluntarily let themselves be injected with viruses??!!!???
Viruses are used as vectors in experimental gene therapy. There are many viruses that do not cause illness in humans, but can still be used as gene carrying "transports." The basic idea is that when the virus enters a a human cell with malfunctioning DNA, the RNA genome of the virus (which has been modified with a version of the "correct" sequence for the malfunctioning human cell) will be reverse transcribed into the host's DNA sequence when the virus uses the cell's machinery to replicate. This process is known as "transduction."
It's not really as simple as that, as the person's immune response to the viral vector can cause problems, and there is often no way to predict where in a cell's DNA the replacement strand actually ends up. Like the article said though, it doesn't seem like the poor woman in the story died as a direct result of the experimental treatment, as she was suffering from a massive fungal infection rather than viral. Unfortunately once experimental treatments reach a certain number of patients there are probably going to be deaths for one reason or another - the data sheets for almost all drugs out there contain statistics on the number of patient deaths that occurred during trials.