Will epigenetics play central role in advancement of precision medicine? David Warmflash

David Warmflash

Is nature or nurture more important?  The question may sound trite applied to any aspect of genetics, including genetic medicine, but it’s an important question.

Diseases and responses to various therapies depend strongly on both one’s genetic makeup and a host of environmental factors. Since the discovery of the DNA double helix in the 1950s, and especially since the first cloning of genes, resulting in GMO insulin, in the 1980s, genetics has played an increasingly important role in clinical medicine. Insulin produced through genetic engineering is just one of several products used routinely to save millions of lives. Increasingly, personal genomes play a central role in the diagnosis of diseases and selection of treatments............when we think of gene therapy, we think of treatments that deliver pieces of DNA with a desired nucleotide sequence (for instance to cure cystic fibrosis, hemophilia or a host of other recessive diseases), the intentional deletion of genes, or what’s now on the horizon, editing of selected sections of a gene’s nucleotide sequence using sophisticated gene editing technology, such as CRISPR-Cas9.......To Read More..