Europe has started gene therapy to treat patients.
This is the second high-profile case, where the latest gene developments causing so much controversy (including moral and ethical issues) began to be implemented in practical medicine. The palm in this area belongs to China, where they are already using gene therapy to treat cancer.
Now EU is also going to apply genetic techniques: a new type of drugs for those at risk of pancreatitis has been approved there. This refers to a rare category of patients (a few people per million) with a congenital defect of a gene. This damaged gene prevents withdrawal of fat particles from the plasma. The essence of the new treatment is that using a safe virus the patients were injected a healthy gene, which enables the body to return to normal metabolism.
Perhaps the introduction of this drug in the EU is the first step to make greater use of genetic engineering.
