At the same time stem cells are promising unprecedented hope for conditions requiring replacement of tissue, another new technology called “RNA interference” may be even bigger. This technology promises to address the one-third of human maladies that are the result of genetic glitches that can’t be fixed by stem cells or by any of today’s “conventional” therapies.
We’re referring to those conditions where either a gene is not doing its job, as when diabetics stop producing insulin, or those where a gene is doing a job that should not be done, as when cancer cells grow out of control.
Scientists have long dreamed of being able to get into the genetic mechanism and turn it on or off, depending on the disease. Finally, crucial trends in genetic research are turning that dream into reality, and the implications promise to be huge.
To understand these trends and why the implications are so enormous, a bit of history is in order:
In the late 1980s, a geneticist was working on enhancing the color of petunias. He wanted to deepen the purple color and so he introduced a special gene. Instead of getting a deep purple as expected, he got white flowers or ones with white patches, indicating that certain genes had been suppressed.
At first, scientists thought this was a quirk of the petunia’s makeup. But then, according to an article in the Electronic Journal of Biotechnology,1 other researchers demonstrated the same sort of gene suppression in other life forms, such as fungi. They began wondering how far they could take this technique, which became known as “post-transcriptional gene splicing,” or PTGS.
A flurry of research in the early 1990s proved that PTGS worked in a number of species, and by 1995, scientists had demonstrated the most efficient way to achieve it was through what is now called “RNA interference.”
How does it work? A gene’s main function is to produce specific proteins for various life functions. RNA is the messenger molecule that takes instructions from the gene and gives them to the cell’s biological factory, where the protein is made. RNA interference stops production of the protein before it occurs.
RNA interference essentially introduces a...
