New Way to Deliver Cell Therapies

Yet another way to deliver therapies to cells has been developed by Johns Hopkins scientist David Gracias and colleagues.

A self-assembling gold-plated cube with perforations, the whole assembly as small as a dust mote, has been developed to time-deliver medications and other therapies directly to targeted tissues.

I am particularly interested in various ways of introducing medicines, hormones, and genes into cells. For those of you similarly interested, I strongly recommend the biosingularity blog linked in the blogroll to the right.

This blog's purpose is to explore ways that people can prepare for and transition to "the next level." Over time I will continue to sketch out the idea of the next level, and why it is subtly different from most concepts of the singularity. Regardless, in order to approach the next level, much better methods of gene therapy will be necessary than are presently available. There are enough reasons for developing gene therapy anyway, with devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, sickle cell disease, Huntington's disease, progeria, and many others, cutting the lives of young and relatively young people short.

It is necessary to look beyond the ability to treat selected diseases, to the broader abilities that will be provided by gene therapies. As the new year evolves, I will spend more time analysing the deeper meanings of this proliferation of discovery.