Next month's inaugural Childx conference will bring a diverse group of experts to Stanford to discuss big challenges in infant, child and maternal health. Today, in a new 1:2:1 podcast interview, stem cell and gene therapy expert Maria Grazia Roncarolo, MD, provides an interesting preview of a once-controversial area of research that will be featured at the conference.
Roncarolo talks about the history and future of stem cell and gene therapy treatments, which have recovered from tragic setbacks such as the 1999 death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger in an early gene therapy trial. The early problems forced researchers to reevaluate what they were doing, with the result that the entire field has reemerged stronger, she explains:
I would say that there were major problems, that we underestimated the complexity that it takes to manipulate the genome, and to introduce a healthy gene to fix a genetic disease. However, from these mistakes and from these tragedies, we learned a lot. We were really forced as doctors, and more importantly, as scientists, to go back to the bench and develop better technologies and to understand more of what was required. ... [Today] we use better vectors -- which are the carriers to introduce the healthy gene -- we know much more about what we have to do to prepare the patient to receive the gene therapy, and we also learned that we need to do a very careful monitoring of the patients to really understand where the gene lands in the genome.
At the Childx conference, Roncarolo will moderate a panel on "Definitive Stem Cell and Gene Therapy for Child Health," hosting such guests as GlaxoSmithKline's senior vice president of rare diseases, Martin Andrews, and Nadia Rosenthal, PhD, founding director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute.
Information about registration for Childx, being held here April 2-3, is available on the conference website.
Previously: Stanford hosts inaugural Childx conference this spring and Stanford researchers receive $40 million from state stem cell agency
Photo by Norbert von der Groeben
