Iran Joins World States with Gene Manipulation Technology
“Our country has been researching and working on stem cells for years but the most important branch of stem cells is genes and we should make further progress in this field,” Amir Ali Hamidiyeh, the secretary of the Stem Cell Technologies Development Headquarters of the Iranian Vice-Presidency for Science and Technology, told ANA.
He elaborated on Iran's capabilities in the field of regenerative medicine and gene therapy, and said, “This technology exists only in two countries of the world, and Iran is the third country that has achieved this technology.”
Hamidiyeh underlined that Iran will stand among the countries that can work on genome editing and intracellular manipulations in the future.
He added that in the past few months, a number of children with cancer completely recovered and returned to life with the help of gene therapy and gene modification.
Iranian specialists and physicians for the first time in the country succeeded in treating a child with leukemia using gene therapy.
A team of Iranian doctors presented a unique method called ‘CAR T-cell therapy’ for the treatment of children with cancer using gene therapy.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a way to get immune cells called T cells (a type of white blood cell) to fight cancer by changing them in the lab so they can find and destroy cancer cells. CAR T-cell therapy is also sometimes talked about as a type of cell-based gene therapy because it involves altering the genes inside T cells to help them attack cancer.
CAR T-cell is the newest method for cancer treatment in the world, which has reached the final stage with the efforts of an Iranian knowledge-based company, Hamidiyeh said.
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