The Negative Impact Of Gene Therapy On Deafness

Gene Therapy Makes an Impact on Deafness Today’s scientific technology has increased; we now have different techniques and methods for saving lives, one being gene therapy. According to Scientific America, gene therapy is when you add a “new gene to a patient’s cell to replace missing” or broken genes. An interesting topic I encountered about gene therapy was, how gene therapy helps deafness. Deafness can be caused by many different reasons. According to Harvard Medical School, they stated that TMC1 gene is a common cause for deafness because it “encodes an important protein that converts sound into electrical signal to travel to the brain” so we can hear. This type of deafness is called, sensorineural deafness because according to Deaf Child Worldwide, “it is a fault in the inner ear or auditory nerve” which occurs because no hair cells are developing. …show more content…
The first test was having the gene TMC1 deleted which is an example of a recessive mutation. The second test was having a single amino acid changed which is an example of a dominant mutation. To complete this test they inserted an engineered virus called “adeno-associated virus 1” (AAV1) along with a promoter which according to Harvard Medical School, is going to “turn the gene on only in certain sensory cells of the inner ear known as hair cells.”. The results for these tests were that the recessive model was able to regain the ability to hear because it created an “electrical current” and “restored activity in the auditory portion of the brainstem” and the dominant model was “successful at the cellular and brain level, but was partially successful at restoring actual hearing”. Overall the test for this gene in the recessive response was successful whereas the test for the dominant response was partially