Cell and Gene Therapy Explained

Cell and Gene Therapy Explained: A guide to cell and gene therapy and UK excellence in the field

As engineers and biologists join forces to build evermore sophisticated gene-editing tools, new classes of medicines are emerging, including cell and gene therapies. These involve altering cells or genes, usually outside the body, to provide a patient-specific therapy that is re-injected into the patient. Scientists’ growing understanding of how genes exert their influence, and of the crucial impact of multiple environmental factors on those genes (“epigenetics”), is opening up new frontiers of drug research. It has led to an explosion of activity around the gut microbiome – the colonies of micro-organisms residing in our gut – and its role in health and disease.