Chennai, Jan. 18 Speaking on ‘New Avenues in Health', organised by Cell Press and TNQ Books and Journals, here on Friday, Dr. David Baltimore said that an integrated, automated management of disease, using small sensors in the body, would be part of the future. Dr. Baltimore was in Chennai on Friday as part of a three-city lecture series organised by Cell Press, the Massachusetts-based publisher of biomedical journals and the Chennai-based TnQ Books and Journals.

Nobel laureate David Baltimore and the next president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said "Engineering the immune system using gene therapy is crucial for the treatment of cancer and HIV,, a combination of stem cell modification, gene therapy and immunotherapy had proved successful in studies on mice. The plan was to translate it on to human beings. "

"We are eliminating safety concerns about gene therapy and plan to make it an accepted practice," Baltimore pointed out.

"I am advocating engineering the immune system as an example of futuristic medicine. Genetic engineering can be used to modify the immune system because it handles pathogens. Chronic diseases, especially cancer, are caused when the system is unable to handle an organ ism," he said. The Nobel laureate observed that the immune system could handle cancer if it were strong.

On treatment of diabetes he advocated small senosrs. For example, in the management of some types of diabetes, a patient needed insulin but required high levels of insulin only when the sugar levels were up, not throughout the day. "Today, the only way we deal with this is to inject insulin, the levels of which go up and fall over the day. This is not the right path,” he said. "Wouldn’t it be nice to have a sensor in the body that could sense the glucose and would tell a pump to release a whiff of insulin when it is needed? That we don’t do today, but we are trying to do today.”A combination of medical doctors and engineers, he assured the audience, would make that happen.

"We can look at ways to make the immune system stronger since cancer cells retain the nature of regular cells, making it difficult for the immune system to handle the affected cells," he observed.

"There are plans to use gene therapy to help treat cancer and HIV by targeting genes with particular tissues. With this method, we can re-programme the immune system, approach direct synthesis of T cell receptors found in cancerous antigens, identify T Cell receptors and re-design their protein structure," Baltimore informed.

Seven projects for HIV treatment are in progress with support from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Although there are concerns about safety, gene therapy is safe and can be made better by making it tissue-specific, he said.

"The approach should be different for treating HIV because the virus is naturally resistant to immune attacks and attempts to improve its nature have failed," Baltimore said and added, "In this case, an antibody is likely to be better than T Cell and we can make cells that can look like antibodies."

He also said that the scientific world is quite excited with the prospect of obtaining stem cells from skin cells for which research is being carried out.- Bureau Report

SR/-