as well as to kill existing cancer cells. doing some basic research I found out that genetic engineering is being used to fight cancer, but they re-engineer the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells. Why not re-engineer the mutated cells themselves?
In: Biology
Cancer cells grow extremelly fast and have a lot of advantages over healthy cells. If you want to fix those cells you’d have to fix all of them at the same time. That’s not an easy task. If you just fix a few cells at once the cancer cells will just keep on growing and those new “fixed” cells will just die anyway.
Plus there’s a bunch of things that are wrong with cancer cells, and by that I mean a lot of mutations. It’s easy to fix one mutation, but fixing a bunch of mutations at once… not so much. That’s why gene therapy works for diseases that are caused by one mutation in the genome. It’s useless against diseases with more than one mutation.
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