Gene therapy for horses
Russian scientists cured a horse of lameness with the help of gene therapy
Biologists from Moscow, Kazan and the UK have created an experimental gene therapy, and cured a horse of lameness with its help, according to an article published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
"We were guided by three tasks – we were advancing medicine, trying to relieve the animal from pain and restore its former mobility. We have shown that all this can be done, and all this can be achieved in a much shorter time than conventional medicines allow. Similarly, it is possible to deal with other injuries and diseases, starting with infertility and ending with spinal injuries," said Albert Rizvanov from Kazan Federal University.
In recent years, scientists have made significant progress in creating various types of gene therapy that allows you to remove individual genes and DNA segments associated with the development of various hereditary diseases and replace them with "corrected" versions. For example, this year scientists created a therapy to combat retinal degeneration, and two years ago they managed to stop muscle degeneration in a mouse suffering from muscle dystrophy.
Despite the negative attitude of society towards such procedures, today they are gradually finding their way into medical practice – recently experiments began in China on volunteers into whose body scientists introduced "transgenic" immune cells, and a year ago doctors from Britain cured a one-year-old girl from leukemia using a special retrovirus.
Rizvanov and his colleagues created one of the first gene therapies designed to treat various ligament and joint injuries, experimenting on horses suffering from lameness caused by damage to the tendons connecting the hoof bones of horses with the muscles of their legs.
Damage to these ligaments as a result of various inflammations, injuries or diseases often lead to the horse becoming lame for the rest of its life, which dramatically reduces its value to the owner and brings constant pain and suffering to the animal itself. As a rule, in about half of the cases, these problems cannot be eliminated surgically or medically, which forces scientists to look for other ways to deal with such injuries.
Russian and British scientists have suggested that you can get rid of all these problems if you force the ligaments to repair themselves by forcibly turning on the genes responsible for the growth of blood vessels and connective tissue in their cells.
Guided by this idea, biologists collected a plasmid – a short circular DNA molecule containing the genes of endothelial vascular growth factor (VEGF164) and fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2), which plays an important role in the development of bone and cartilage, multiplied it and injected the resulting solution into the damaged part of the ligaments of a 13-year-old stallion undergoing treatment in one of the veterinary centers of Kazan.
Just three weeks after the DNA injection, the animal completely got rid of all signs of lameness, which returned it to the level of speed and agility of movement that was characteristic of this horse before the injury. Similar results were achieved during repeated experiments on another stallion, whose sports career would have ended at the age of 9 if scientists had not tried to cure him.
As Rizvanov and his colleagues note, it is possible to deal with ligament injuries in a similar way among athletes, as well as other categories of people whose tendons and spine experience high loads.
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