A snip here, an insertion there and some mass production of specially equipped armed forces could well be the essence of medicine tomorrow. ‘Engineering’ is the key word in what Nobel laureate David Baltimore identifies as one of the challenging approaches to tackling cancer and infectious diseases in future.

Whether it is engineering a protein or a cell or “engineering immunity”, the end result could be a reinforced defence mechanism. In experiments that have shown in mice that tumours vanish permanently, what Baltimore and team did was to “beef up the immunity system” by targetting the bad guys, or the inhibitors of the body’s immune system.

“We engineered the T-cells, which are the body’s defence soldiers and kill cancer cells. By actually synthesising the receptors on these cells to target the cancer cell antigens, and then using gene therapy and stem cell therapy, we were able to produce the receptors in large numbers in the bone marrow of the mice,” he told the audience  at IISc where he spoke on ‘new avenues to health.’ The tumour was successfully destroyed. They now plan very shortly to go into clinical studies in humans.

The team also showed that using targeted virus, the mice can be immunised against tumour. Baltimore believes that there is enormous potential for personalised medicine using genomics to see how each person would respond to certain drug.  

“By knowing which genes are responsible for which disease, we now can say who is at risk and how to prevent a disease. It also gives us a target for disease treatment,” he said. There is “huge opportunity” in integrated automated management of diseases, like nanoscale sensors “which sense insulin levels and link it to a pump that releases the precise amount of insulin.”

Synthetic biology

Even more exciting is the field of synthetic biology where “we can have artificial controllers inside cells to do as required!” There are some safety concerns right now but he believes that these will be addressed soon.