A ‘Vaccine’ for Heart Disease Could Mean No Pills, Lettuce or a Gym time/#2853809/a-vaccine-for-heart-disease-that-doesnt-involve-pills-lettuce-or-a-gym/ >Taking advantage of advances in genetic engineering, a team lead by Musunuru, who holds positions at Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have edited the genomes of mice and successfully protected them from heart disease. The results, published in the journal Circulation Research, hint at an entirely new way of avoiding the leading killer of Americans by possibly cutting heart attack risk by up to 90%. “What has me excited as a cardiologist is that my goal is eradicating disease,” says Musunuru. “There is no bolder way I can put it. I want to eradicate the disease and this offers one potential way to do it.” >So far, says Musunuru, there have been no negative effects of the genetic disruption. But he says more research needs to be done to make sure that introducing the changes won’t come with unforeseen consequences. “When we go in there we want to make sure we are not introducing new spelling errors in the genome,” says Srivastava, who is also using the technique for stem-cell based therapies to treat heart disease. Says Musunuru, “I think I can confidently say that with this tool, this technology will work on live, breathing human beings, but we need to figure out the safety; that’s the barrier to overcome before we can test these therapies.”
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:30:47 +0000