• Question: if u took a cell out that has the disease in it would that stop the disease from spreading? wuz

    Asked by wuzzy to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Good question! but unfortunately there are two problems with this approach.

      firstly how would you find one cell in a part of the body. i don’t think that medical science is that advanced yet 🙁 and how would you make sure you had the right one? The problem is bigger for diseases like Parkinson’s disease because by the time you get ill a lot of your cells have already died. You would need to be to pick up a dying cell much earlier in that persons life.

      And secondly our organs are made of groups of identical. All the brain cells affected by Parkinson’s disease are the same, all the cells of our muscles are the same…. So if something has damaged one cell then by the time you find it and take it out, the damage has probably already happened to another cell. Since all brain cells talk to each other all the time if you were to take one out you will stop it talking to another part of the brain which might then also lead to problems.

      good idea though 🙂

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hi Wuz!

      As Amy said, it can be tricky to locate the affected cells, and remove them. And even if you do, there’s no reason to expect the disease won’t develop in a new batch of cells.

      An alternative approach is to try and make the cells better without removing them. Cystic Fibrosis (“CF” for short) is a disease that affects the lungs, meaning that they can’t get rid of the mucus that builds up, so they are more likely to develop lung infections, which can be fatal. There are treatments available, which involve taking lots of drugs, and lots of excercises to clear the lungs. While these therapies have led to CF patients living much longer than they used to, but it’s a difficult life. It would be a lot better if we could “fix” what’s going wrong.

      Luckily, we know what’s going wrong. CF is caused by a difference in the instructions in a single gene. It’s a recessive disease, which means you need to get a ‘bad’ gene from both of your parents to get the disease. Some of my colleagues are working on a ‘gene therapy’ for CF. This involves getting a ‘good’ copy of the gene into the lung cells, and using that to replace the bad copy in the lungs. Luckily the lungs are a relatively easy target, as you can breathe stuff in, and it gets straight there. My colleagues have tested their therapies on sheep, and are starting a clinical trial looking at human CF patients, where they will inhale the ‘good’ copies of the gene. While it’s still very difficult, and has a degree of risk, it should be a easier than removing the affected cells.

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