"An exploration of genes, inheritance and gene therapy for diabetes" - Essay Example

Besides, if one’s exposure to the microorganism is delayed due to the better standards of the living, which hinders the development of the immune system causing to make the person vulnerable to this disease. Gene therapy is the method by which one foreign gene into any cell is introduced into the body of the patient in order to produce insulin. The introduced gene could be the insulin gene itself, but it must be controlled by specific tissue promoter which is encoded as a factor in order to activate the insulin gene (Kelly, 2007).

Cell transplantation is more successful treatment for diabetes as compared to the method of using insulin injections. The transplantation of organs, tissues or cells between animal species usually provides a number of beta cells, which is known as xenotransplantation. The most suitable donor of organs or cells is the pig but the major problem in using the pig’s organs for transplantation is that it is difficult to obtain in the tissue culture and the islets of the adult pig because of their poor survival.

One more serious problem in xenotransplantation is an infection, which occurs because of the endogenous porcine retroviruses, which has a potentiality to infect human cell in vitro and vivo (Allman, 2008). Expansion of the primary beta cells and beta cell precursors can also be helpful in gene therapy. Beta cells are normally present in small bodies deep rooted in the pancreas known as islets. Beta cells do not have enough capacity for replication. There are a number of gene transduction methods in practice in the world in order to treat different disease including diabetes.

These include viral and non-viral methods (LeRoith et al., 2004). Non-viral methods such as calcium phosphate co-precipitation are a very simple and an affordable method for genetically modifying pancreatic cells. When calcium