APPLICATIONS OF BIOTECHNOLOGY AND GENETIC ENGINEERING

  Medicine In medicine, biotechnology has promising applications in areas such as:

Drug production: Mouse hybidomas, cells fused together to create monoclonal antibodies, have been produced through genetic engineering to create human monoclonal antibodies.

Pharmacogenomics: It is the study of how the genetic inheritance of an individual affects his/her body’s response to drugs. It has following benefits:

•      Development of tailor –made medicines. These medicines promise not only to maximize therapeutic effects but also to decrease damage to nearby healthy cells.

• More accurate methods of determining drug dosages

•       Improvement in the drug discovery and approval process

•   Safe and best vaccines.

Gene therapy: It can be used for treating, or even curing, genetic and acquired diseases like cancer and AIDS by using normal genes to supplement or replace defective genes. It can be used to target somatic cell or gamete cells. In somatic gene therapy, the genome of the recipient is changed, but this the genome of the recipient is changed, but this change is not passed along the next generation. In germline gene therapy can done at two levels:

•        Ex vivo: Cells from the patients’ blood or bone marrow are removed and grown in the laboratory. They are then exposed to a virus carrying the desired gene. The desired gene then becomes part of the DNA of the cells.

•         In vivo: Vectors are used to deliver the desired gene to cells in the patient’s body.

The useful products of Biotechnology

Product	Main use
Insulin	Stimulate glucose uptake from blood in people with insulin dependent  diabetes
Erthropoietin	Prevents anemia
Growth hormone	Replaces missing  hormones
Factor VIII	Replaces clotting factor
Colony-stimulating factor	Stimulates production of WBC
Platelet-derived growth factor	Stimulates wound healing
Tissue plasminogen activator	Dissolve blood clots
Vaccine proteins: Hepatitis B, herepes,  influenza, lyme disease, meningitis, etc	Prevent and treat infectious diseases

Genetic –screening:  It involves the direct examination of the DNA molecule. The DNA of patients is screened for mutated sequences. Genetic testing is now used for Carrier screening or the identification of unaffected individual but has one copy for a gene responsible for disease.

Sex determination

Forensic/identify testing (see DNA Fingerprinting Chapter 8)

Newborn Screwing

Prenatal diagnostic screening 

Presymptomatic testing It is done for estimating the risk of developing and predicting adult -onset disorders such as Hungtington’s disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Organisms are genetically engineered to discover the functions of certain genes. These experiments involve loss of function, gain of function, tracking and expression.