Aggregated News
WASHINGTON, March 2 - Fifteen years after experiments with human gene therapy began in earnest, a federal drug advisory panel on Friday will discuss the death of a French child in one such experiment and why, after so many years of hope, the technology has been such a disappointment.
Three major gene therapy trials in the United States have been suspended pending the outcome of the meeting. Dr. Donald Kohn, the principal investigator in one of those trials, said, "I'm going to tell the committee that there is a significant difference between the French trial and ours."
Dr. Kohn, a professor of pediatrics and microbiology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, said that the type of immune deficiency in his trial's patients was different from that in the French research and that the genes that were made the target of the therapies were therefore also different.
What the Food and Drug Administration wants to know is whether those differences are significant enough, said the advisory committee's chairman, Dr. Mahendra S. Rao, a researcher at the National...
Three major gene therapy trials in the United States have been suspended pending the outcome of the meeting. Dr. Donald Kohn, the principal investigator in one of those trials, said, "I'm going to tell the committee that there is a significant difference between the French trial and ours."
Dr. Kohn, a professor of pediatrics and microbiology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, said that the type of immune deficiency in his trial's patients was different from that in the French research and that the genes that were made the target of the therapies were therefore also different.
What the Food and Drug Administration wants to know is whether those differences are significant enough, said the advisory committee's chairman, Dr. Mahendra S. Rao, a researcher at the National...