Mini Drug Factory Churns out Drugs from Inside Bone
骨骼里的小型药品厂能生产各种药物
Imagine never having to take a pill again. Instead, mini drug factories hidden inside your bones, and made from your own immune cells, would churn out personalised drugs and other molecules designed to keep you fit and healthy. Such a factory has been created in mice, and could soon be tested in humans to treat HIV.
想象一下你再也不用去吃药丸，取而代之的是你骨骼里的小型药品工厂，该工厂是由你的免疫细胞制造，它将生产出个性化的药物和其他分子来保持你的健康。这样的工厂已经在老鼠身上实现，很快就可以在人体上接受检验来治疗艾滋病毒。
"We want to turn people's cells into drug factories, giving them the genetic information they need to produce their own treatment," says Matthew Scholz of Immusoft in Seattle. Immusoft is focusing on B-cells, a component of the immune system. One of their roles is to produce antibodies against infections or unwanted foreign substances such as toxins. In 2009，David Baltimore and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena showed that stem cells from bone marrow could be engineered to develop into B-cells that made antibodies against HIV.
西雅图Immusoft公司的马修·肖尔茨说:“我们希望将人体的细胞转化成药物工厂，给予它们需要的遗传信息以创造出它们自己的治疗方法。”Immusoft公司专注于B细胞研究，B细胞是免疫系统的一个组成部分。其角色之一就是产生防止感染或有害外来物质，如毒素的抗体。2009年，帕萨迪纳市加州理工学院的大卫·巴尔蒂莫和他的同事表示，骨髓中的干细胞可以被用来发展B细胞，从而形成HIV抗体。
The Immusoft researchers have built on that work, extracting immature B-cells from human blood and treating them with a virus that inserts the genetics code for a new protein. When the modified cells were injected into the bloodstream of mice, some migrated to the bone marrow. Her they began making the proteins they had been engineered to make a class of so-called broadly neutralising antibodies against HIV. "I think this is potentially very important," says Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, who has been engineering another part of the immune system, T-cells, to fight HIV.
Immusoft的研究人员以这一研究为基础，从人血中提取未成熟的B细胞，并把它们与病毒插入基因代码，获得新的蛋白质。当修改后的细胞注射到老鼠的血液中时，一些细胞迁移到骨髓。现在它们开始制作已经设计的蛋白质。美国费城宾夕法尼亚大学的卡尔在6月份时说：“我认为这可能会非常重要。”卡尔一直在建造另一部分的免疫系统--T细胞--用来抗击艾滋病。
"But whether this has clinical use depends on the efficiency of gene transfer, expression and secretion of the antibody, and most importantly the level of secreted protein in body fluids."
他说:“但是这是否有临床用途，取决于基因转移、表现和抗体的分泌，最重要的是体液中分泌性蛋白的水平。”
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