How your body could outlive the genome you were born with
What if the genome you were born with wasn’t fixed? Eric Kelsic, CEO of Dyno Therapeutics, explains how gene therapy is moving from promise to reality, delivering treatments directly to cells and potentially curing diseases for a lifetime.
Eric Kelsic: As humans, we all want the same thing, a life that’s full of good experiences, more time with family, with friends, more time to love, but sometimes genetic illness can cut that short or really, for all of us at some point, our body breaks down.
And our bodies are genetic machines. For many diseases, the cause of the disease is a mutation in the genome. Gene therapy is a vision that many have had for decades, more than 50 years.
The power of genetic technology is that once you get inside of cells with a DNA molecule, that molecule can stay there for the lifetime of the cell. So it’s the potential for a one-time treatment for a disease where you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach the cells and solve for the root cause of the disease.
Today though, for the most part, the genome you’re born with is the genome you die with. Access to this molecular level is out of reach for almost all of us. We’ve tried many different things, but have really struggled to be able to get enough of the genetic payload into the cells where they’re gonna be effective as a therapeutic. And it’s getting inside of the cells that has really been a challenge for many, many years.
I’m Eric Kelsic, CEO and co-founder at Dyno Therapeutics. For the past 10 years, I’ve been working to solve the grand challenge of gene delivery. How are we gonna make gene therapy a mainstream kind of medicine?
We need to solve these grand challenges like delivery, being able to deliver a therapeutic payload to every organ or every cell where there might be some benefit to patient health.
