Longevity science

A medical treatment that uses stem cells derived from bone marrow has just been approved in Canada.

 

The drug, Prochymal, has already been used to treat children for a type of immune disease arising during bone marrow transplantation.

 

Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in genetically engineering algae to produce a complex and expensive human therapeutic drug used to treat cancer.

Their achievement opens the door for making these and other “designer” proteins in larger quantities and much more cheaply than can now be made from mammalian cells.

Medical researchers expect that with whole genome sequencing, treatment will be tailored to an individual tumor’s mutations, with drugs, eventually, that hit several key aberrant genes at once.

 

What is important, the researchers say, is the genes that drive a cancer, not the tissue or organ — liver or brain, bone marrow, blood or colon — where the cancer originates.