Monkey Gene Therapy May Treat Muscle Man
Healthy Lifestyle August 30th, 2010
WASHINGTON – Thanks to a study conducted on monkeys, just steps away from the scientists can find ways to treat patients with muscular dystrophy.
Muscular dystrophy (MD) usually defined as a group of genetic or hereditary muscle disease that weakens the muscles of the human body mover.
In a study published in the journal Science this Translational Medicine, found that monkeys are able to grow bigger thigh muscles after receiving gene therapy. Genetically, the monkey is almost same with humans. So successful method of gene therapy is likely to be applied to humans as well. Such information is quoted from NPR, Thursday (12/11/2009).
Research on compounds involved muscle protein called myostatin is produced naturally in the body. Normally, muscles in order to prevent myostatin not enlarged. But when the compound was removed or blocked the activity, the muscles can become great.
Previous studies, conducted in mice, showing that lack of myostatin in rodents that will raise muscle two times greater than normal mice muscle.
Jerry Mendell of the Center for Gene Therapy Research Institute at the mention of gene therapy techniques to remove and stop the activity of myostatin can work very well in mice.
“But some things can work in mice do not necessarily apply to humans,” said Mendell.
“Therefore, we decided that the best way to test this gene therapy model is to test it on monkeys,” he added.
Mendell and his team tested the monkey Macaca species by injecting genes in the right thigh monkeys are in a few months, they begin to see the changes.
“We found a gene injected muscles become larger. This experiment also proved that the thighs are getting gene therapy to be more powerful than untreated muscle genes,” he said
