IT HAS been hailed as the new gene therapy, but the comparison may be getting a bit too close for comfort. The promising technique of RNA interference, or RNAi, now has its own safety scare: one variant of the method can cause fatal liver damage in mice.
Gene therapy aims to cure diseases by giving cells healthy copies of defective genes. However, it is difficult to deliver therapeutic genes to a sufficiently high number of cells, and the field has been beset by safety scares – including three cases of leukaemia among children treated for severe immune deficiency.
RNAi turns the…
