Tag
#biotechnology
Every article tagged “biotechnology”.
7 articles
Biotechnology
Gene therapy is given once, and almost every hard problem in the field comes from that
The virus that delivers a working gene also teaches the immune system to destroy it. You get one attempt — which is why the dose is enormous, the price is enormous, and a large share of patients are excluded before treatment is even considered.
Read more →
Biotechnology
A PCR test can call you positive weeks after you stopped being infectious. That is the test working correctly
PCR is a photocopier for one chosen stretch of DNA, and it doubles what it finds thirty times over. Almost everything people find confusing about the test — the lingering positives, the Ct number, the false negatives — is a direct consequence of that.
Read more →
Biotechnology
The insulin in that pen was made by microbes that were handed a human gene
Until 1982 insulin came from slaughtered pigs and cattle. Today it is brewed by bacteria or yeast carrying a synthetic human gene — and the fermentation is the easy part. What happens after it is the reason a protein drug costs what it does.
Read more →
Biotechnology
A cancer drug that cannot be manufactured in a factory, because it is made out of the patient
CAR-T therapy takes a patient's own immune cells, gives them a receptor that does not exist in nature, and puts them back. It has cured people whose leukaemia had run out of options — and its cost, its side effects and its failure against solid tumours all trace to the same design.
Read more →
Biotechnology
Nobody reads a genome from beginning to end — what a sequencing machine actually does
A sequencer does not run along a chromosome reading letters like a tape. It shreds the genome into millions of fragments, reads the pieces, and leaves a computer to work out the order. Almost everything confusing about genomics follows from that.
Read more →
Biotechnology
How a lab grows human tissue outside the body
Given the right scaffold and signals, human cells will assemble themselves into miniature gut, liver or brain tissue in a dish. Here is how organoids are grown, what they are useful for, and where they stop short of being organs.
Read more →
Biotechnology
CRISPR gene editing, explained simply
CRISPR lets scientists edit DNA with a precision that once sounded like science fiction. Here is how the 'find and replace' of the genome actually works — and where it is already being used.
Read more →