THE ONLY GOOD VIRUS IS A DEAD VIRUS

An adenovirus, presumably dead

Viruses are bad, right?  Well, not necessarily.  Dead or denatured virus is used as a messenger boy, to deliver modified genes to the correct place in the DNA molecule.  How?  Believe me, if I knew I would show off by explaining it to you, at great length.  But I don’t know, so you are spared some – perhaps boring – biology. Give thanks.

Anyway, they do use virus to deliver the goodies, and therein lies a problem you probably didn’t anticipate:  there is an acute shortage of properly prepared virus.  There are entire biotech firms wholly devoted to the preparation of types of properly modified viruses – and they have years of backlog.  It turns out that you don’t fix up medicinal virus in your garage.  It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to get into the game.  That is partially why some new drugs cost so much.  Partially.

All this is explained in the NYTimes article below.  Take a few minutes and read it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/health/gene-therapy-virus-shortage.html?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_sc_20171127&nl=science-times&nl_art=1&nlid=69247603&ref=headline&te=1  

Linda and Ella