Hayley Wester knows all too well about the time-intensive practice of translating discoveries into results. Four times a day, she thumps her lungs to clear clogging mucus caused by cystic fibrosis, an ailment that stems from an error in a single gene. Fix the gene and cure the patients. But that's not as easy as it sounds. Since cystic fibrosis was discovered seven years ago, researchers have learned a lot about how difficult it is to turn that discovery into something practical that patients can use.
Wester is part of the latest effort to devise an effective cystic fibrosis gene therapy.
A virus carrying the corrected gene was squirted into her sinuses. Previous attempts had disappointing results. It caused the disease, and the patient's own body reacted against the virus by producing antibodies. A more recent experiment used a virus that usually causes no symptoms. In an effort to avoid the side effects caused in previous experiments, researchers removed almost all of the virus's original genes.