Gene therapy – because of the still limited understanding, even for medical professionals – is something in which we still have little faith as a medical treatment. Because we do not fully understand the process and because it is not something that is considered the norm in medical treatment the general reaction is to fear it and to be sceptical of its claims.
Gene therapy provides a great hope for the future in that one day people might not have to die prematurely because of an unlucky dealing of genes. The main advantage of gene therapy – giving someone who is born with a genetic disorder or someone who is diagnosed with cancer a hope of a cure and a normal happy life – far outweighs the cost when it is being used for something as wonderful as saving a life.
Benefits over traditional drug therapy
When gene therapy is successful it has a number of benefits over traditional drug therapy treatments. In most cases, drugs will never cure a disease but only ease symptoms or slow the progression of that disease. Gene therapy has the potential to do exactly this – cure a person of the disease that is ultimately ruining their life.
Furthermore, drugs very often have side effects of varying concerns which to be fair are often simply irritating or uncomfortable rather than life-threatening but all the same are inconvenient. Gene therapy, when successful, has little, if any, side effects and can therefore have very little impact on your everyday life.
The concept of gene therapy is to provide the body with the means to make its own, healthy proteins and therefore there is no need to fuel the body with the unnatural chemicals you find in drug therapies that have the same purpose of producing the proteins your body is lacking.
Finally, where drugs can often be an ongoing and lifelong form of treatment for an illness, gene therapy can have long term effects in only a few treatments and once the true potential of gene therapy has been realised it will be possible to cure a disease within these few treatments.
Gene therapy provides a hope for curing some of the diseases that currently bring so much tragedy to people’s lives and when gene therapy is being used for these things it is difficult to argue that gene therapy is a bad thing. With time and with much more research will come major developments in our understanding of gene therapy and its potential; and if we can achieve this then gene therapy can one day be a tried, tested and trustworthy method just like drug therapy is today.
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