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DNA Vaccine May Treat Multiple Sclerosis
GSASoftware writes "Multiple sclerosis is a serious, as-yet incurable neurological disease which causes blindness, paralysis and other serious symptoms. In a new development, a neuroimmunology researcher in Montreal has developed a therapeutic DNA vaccine. The cause of the disease is not fully understood, but it appears to be auto-immune. If a DNA vaccine can be an effective therapy for this auto-immune disease, is it possible that DNA vaccines could treat other auto-immune diseases like Crohn's, eczema, and others?"
I suffer from MS; the last I heard of a vaccine was last year: they shut the study after a couple of patients died.
This is are very interesting and promising news for me. Perhaps in a couple of years I won't need my daily anti-fatigue pills, weekly interferon beta 1a shots, and those occasional hospital corticoid shock treatments. Probably I'll never recover for the disabilities I've already got, but at least I won't develop any further because of MS!
Your comment has been tagged as Funny. I hope that is how you intended it to be (and the title suggests that you did), because otherwise you are being totally ignorant and offensive. I have a loved one who is suffering from MS. She hasn't done anything to 'deserve it'. It isn't caused by having loose morals. Its effects, however, are devastating. Her life and my own, as well as the lives of many members of our family, have been changed as a result of the disease. Our home has had to be modified so that she can live on a single level, our plans for the future have been destroyed as she is unable to do the everyday things that we had planned to do, and her daily life is very much affected by the limitations that are brought on by the disease. To her, a visit to the local shops is a difficult adventure, to travel further afield might sometimes be impossible, to sit in the garden and look at the flowers can be the most exciting thing to occur in her day, to do some housework presents her with challenges that you and I cannot imagine. Personally, I find it hard to view such things as 'Funny'. Enjoy your laugh, I will not begrudge you that, but I hope that there is some light at the end of our tunnel as a result of the research that is described in the article.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccination
DNA is the active ingredient of the vaccine, if they mean what people usually mean by "DNA vaccine".
To vaccinate against a pathogen, you'd take some gene from it that codes for a surface protein, inject that DNA into muscle cells, let them express it and produce the protein, and the immune system would learn to react.
Which leaves plenty of confusion, since the goal of MS therapy would be to turn off the immune response to myelin, not to create an immune response.
This isn't about gene therapy.
Multiple Sclerosis = Multiple areas of scarring in the CNS (Brain, Spinal Cord, Optic Nerves)
The term you are looking for is "epigenetics".
It generally refers to gene regulation via mechanisms beyond DNA sequence. A good example of this is what is called "x chromosome silencing" in all women. While women have two equivalent X chromosomes, one is "permanently silenced" during very early development. This ensures that all of the woman's cells will read X chromosome genes from the same chromosome. No pattern for this has been demonstrated, to the best of my knowledge (as far as favoring paternal vs maternal or anything of that nature).
A more complicated epigenetic mechanism is via the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code/. While the code itself is still very much under investigation, it has shown many important traits in gene expression as time and conditions vary for an organism.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.