STAT+: A new startup looks to turn the workhorse of gene therapy against cancer
“This is already the way your body fights cancer. We're basically just supercharging this and harnessing it and putting it into gene therapy.”
In 1980, Life and Time magazines introduced America to a new cancer wonder drug: interferon, a protein ripped from the body’s own immune system that showed exciting early results, before ultimately proving both too impotent and too toxic to be useful beyond a couple of malignancies.
Researchers have spent the decades since searching for ways to bottle and repeat the early success seen in those first studies for interferon and another immune-signaling molecule called interleukin-2, with flashes of progress and some very expensive failures.
Now, a former University of California San-Francisco investigator, Nicole Paulk, is proposing a new solution. Paulk wants to take docile viruses developed for gently delivering healthy genes into patients with devastating genetic diseases and use them to slide interferons and other immune-stimulating molecules into unsuspecting cancer cells.
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