What can we do with genes in medicine?

Conférence d'Alain Fischer (Collège de France),  le 29 juin 2017, lors du séminaire général du département de physique de l'ENS.

What can we do with genes in medicine ? The case of immunology


Over the last 50 years, advances in molecular biology and genetics have made genome engineering possible.
This resulted, amongst many applications, in the medical development of gene therapy. The latter was first successfully used to treat rare inherited disorders of the immune system because of specificities of the immune cells (T lymphocytes). Based on a `gene addition’ strategy that requires viruses as gene carriers, gene therapy is now being used to treat several inherited disorders of the immune system while applications to immunotherapy of some cancers have also been successfully implemented. The next challenge will be to edit mutated genes to fix mutations rather than gene addition, a promising strategy that is still in its infancy.