Gene therapy is an exciting area of medicine. There are researchers working on how they can use modified viruses to deliver missing genes into our cells to try and cure genetic conditions.
I think it is more likely that DNA within a pathogen could be changed to make an attenuated pathogen – that is one that looks similar to the immune system but doesn’t make us sick. Then if you got injected with the attenuated pathogen, you would develop a strong immune response and be protected before being exposed to the original form of the pathogen. This was done the old fashioned way – by waiting for an attenuated strain to arise through natural mutation – in the past but now it could be much more deliberate.
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christldonnelly commented on :
I think it is more likely that DNA within a pathogen could be changed to make an attenuated pathogen – that is one that looks similar to the immune system but doesn’t make us sick. Then if you got injected with the attenuated pathogen, you would develop a strong immune response and be protected before being exposed to the original form of the pathogen. This was done the old fashioned way – by waiting for an attenuated strain to arise through natural mutation – in the past but now it could be much more deliberate.