Most medical professionals have come to accept gene therapy as a
medical technique that will eventually provide more efficient
care to patients, without the side effects of traditional
treatments. This is why new research from the Scripps Research
Institute is being hailed as being helpful to those interested
in personalized medicine. Zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) proteins
are considered by researchers to be extremely valuable because
they can be used in genetic therapy techniques. They work to
disassemble DNA strands in a way that is beneficial to the
patient, even replicating themselves in order to attack harmful
genes. The problem with this technique is that the vehicle used
to deliver ZFN to the cell is often a virus. While the virus is
essentially harmless by itself, scientists have found that it
could accidentally integrate itself into newly produced cells.
Researchers found that they could not predict when this foreign
material would enter cells, so there was an unwanted element of
risk involved. For this