Objective Summary: Gene Therapy

       In the first chapters of "Gene Therapy" by Joseph Panno, Panno explains what genetic diseases are and how they work, he goes on to inform audiences of how drugs go through clinical trials and how it's similar to gene therapy clinical trials. Genetic diseases are generally very debilitating and often incurable with conventional treatments. Gene therapy is the supposed answer to these incurable, debilitating diseases. The author goes into extensive detail on how the human immune system interacts with viruses and how they can exploited to insert favorable genes into patients (learn more here). Panno goes on to explain how most drugs go through 3-4 clinical trials before they are released to the public and how those trials were similar to the clinical trials that the first therapeutic genes went through. He concludes by recounting the details of the first gene therapy trial and how it was a major success.