• Question: could you use genes to create a disease for a particular person?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      This is an interesting question – and sounds a bit like science fiction. In fact, a science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, proposed a similar idea in his Mars trilogy of books, where the characters in the book use a virus to infect themselves with their own DNA as a way of rejuvenating their cells for longer life. In reality, we’re still a way off from being able to engineer a virus to target an individual person, either for treatment or to give them a disease. Scientists have managed to make an artificial yeast genome though, so being able to build microbes with the genes of our choosing probably isn’t too far off.

    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      We could use genetic engineering to design new infectious agents. Scientists have created synthetic viruses from scratch (although they are based on natural viruses) and it wouldn’t be too difficult to make any alterations that were wanted.

      The much more difficult thing to do would be to find out exactly what alterations to a virus did what. At the moment I don’t think we’d know enough about how viruses and humans interact to create a virus that could attack just one person and no-one else.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Very sci-fi 🙂
      There is a growing area of medicine that rely more and more on our ability to read the sequence of peoples genes and so tailor medicine to individual people or groups of people. There is still a long to go on this though.
      As for making a personal targeted virus or bacteria I’m not sure we yet have the tools to do this. Most viruses enter cells using receptors on the surface of the cells, the receptors are used by the cells to send signals or absorb materials from the outside so a virus makes use of this system with special structures that act like keys opening the way into the cells. The receptors on the cell surface are different between different cell types and are also different between different species but they are mostly the same within one species for a particular cell type. So the cells in your liver have basically the same receptors as the ones in my liver 🙂 For this reason we probably couldn’t make a virus that would only attack one person’s cells.

      However, in theory you could design a virus (for example) with a genetic code that would only allow it to insert itself into a specific genome (a genome is the collection of all the genetic material an animal or person has) but to do this you would need such an exact link between virus genes and target genes that the risk of failure would be huge. The level of control over the genes we would need during the manufacture of something like that just might not be possible. As the technology moves forward and we get better and better at gene manipulation though who knows what we will be able to do in the future….I have a feeling something like this would be used for good though. There is a lot of research going right now looking at ways to use manipulated viruses to deliver only to particular cells and at particular times. This kind of work may soon open the way to new cancer treatments with far fewer side effects imagine chemotherapy drugs that went straight to the cancer cells and didn’t harm any other cells in a person’s body. These things are still years away but the potential is incredible 🙂

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