Gene therapy

Gene therapy is a new class of treatments that promise to treat and possibly cure many debilitating diseases. In contrast to conventional treatments, gene therapy treats the cause of the disorder rather than just the symptoms. Gene therapy functions by inserting new genetic material, either DNA or RNA, into a patient’s damaged cells. The most […]

Lentiviral vectors

A common vehicle used extensively in gene therapy is the lentiviral vector (LV). The LV is a replication-defective viral vector, generated from HEK293T cells (human embryonic kidney cells) after the transfection with plasmids (DNA molecules) dedicated for the assembling of particular viral parts (envelope, capsid, nucleoproteins, viral RNA, reverse transcriptase, integrase etc). The purified particles […]