THE finger of suspicion for the leukaemia that struck a young French boy receiving gene therapy is pointing squarely at the retrovirus used to treat his condition.
Alain Fischer and his colleagues at the Necker Hospital in Paris worked with a retrovirus called the murine leukaemia virus (MLV). To prevent the virus replicating in the body, they stripped out its reproductive genes. Then they used the modified virus to ferry a healthy copy of the boy’s defective gene into cells taken from his bone marrow. The MLV infected the cells, dropping itself and the healthy gene into the boy’s DNA.…
