09 de març 2018

Medicine trends

The future of medicine

A new supplement in Nature explains the main trends in Medicine. It is really helpful to have a quick look focused on those approaches that are the more promising for the next future. From the issue, I would pick one article: A CRISPR edit for heart disease, A one-off injection to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease is now a prospect thanks to advances in gene editing.This is amazing, it changes current perspectives on the first cause of death worldwide (18 million people per year).
 In 2014, Musunuru and his team showed that more than half of Pcsk9 genes in the mouse liver could be silenced with a single injection of an adenovirus containing a CRISPR–Cas9 system directed against Pcsk9. This led to a roughly 90% decrease in the level of Pcsk9 in the blood and a 35–40% fall in blood LDL cholesterol4. Next, they used a mouse engineered to contain human liver cells, and tuned the CRISPR–Cas9 payload to target human PCSK95. The team succeeded in showing that the human gene can also be switched off.
This is changing the focus of drug research, and a recent article explains the new approach.  Let's see if finally delivers what they say.