It’s a world of epic complexity – and new technology is helping unravel these often complex findings.
Scientists from around the world have discovered a range of new medicines and treatments, and they’re developing innovations for doing this by combining our technology, looking at our human biology, and looking at our technology in ways that haven’t been done before.
Any of these interactions can have a profound impact on human medicine.
What’s new about gene therapy is that it opens up the opportunity to take different approaches to the treatment of various diseases. One of the most important things to remember is that these technologies are very much incremental. So they are always intended to help either patients or the overall health of the population in a highly tailored manner.
When you are looking at a very complex tissue, which is the human body, it doesn’t work very quickly. If you want to use one of these technologies to help people with cancer for example, the process is hugely complex and the target we are working on can be many years ahead of where it will reach.
For example, for patients in the U.S. the goal is to have this technology ready to use around 2025 to treat children, where we can begin to measure the number of proteins produced in the body and explore whether those proteins are making disease symptoms or expressing in tissues to help mitigate or even prevent the symptoms from developing.
Part of the goal of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is to work with other agencies around the world, especially as they move to care for more global populations, to make sure that the tools we are giving to populations around the world are ones that can be used in a form that can rapidly and deeply help patients around the world.
The application of technologies such as gene therapy and cell therapy in these ways ultimately will help facilitate our treatment, research and research of more than two million American diseases that are present right now in the U.S. and no treatments available that will allow us to treat them.
Whether we are looking at cancer or heart disease or diabetes, we are starting to get to point where we can find a therapeutic way to deal with that disease, in part by building on these new technologies.