Our Mission
At the HopeRxX Foundation, our mission is to provide support and compassionate care for individuals facing life-threatening health challenges and disadvantaged children. We are dedicated to improving their quality of life through supporting innovative research with the help of advanced artificial intelligence. Our goal is to support research groups that are looking into leveraging gene therapy as a possible mode of treatment for certain forms of cancer.
What is cancer, and what is gene therapy?
Cancer, as we know, is caused by the uncontrolled growth of cells. It usually manifests in the body as tumors that start in one area, such as the breast, and begin to spread (or "invade") the rest of the body in a process called metastasis.
The uncontrolled cell growth that occurs in cancer is caused by a change in the genome in a regular cell, meaning the genes in a normal cell that typically regulates cell growth is mutated and thus the cell growth goes out of control. This usually happens genes of two types are mutated; genes that promote cell growth and reproduction (called oncogenes) or tumor suppressor genes, which inhibit cell growth and survival.
These mutations can be caused by a multitude of factors, such as but not limited to viruses like HPV (which causes cervical cancer), contact with mutagenic dangerous chemicals referred to as carcinogens, or exposure to radiation like UV radiation, which causes skin cancer.
Gene therapy refers to a wide variety of techniques that either modify, replace, or repair faulty genes within a patient's cells in order to treat (or prevent) a genetic disease or disorder. Usually, this is done by introducing genetic material into the patient's cells through a vector, usually a harmless virus.
Gene therapy can work in many different ways. For example, if a genome is missing a certain gene, a functional and healthy copy of a gene is introduced to replace the missing one (referred to as gene replacement). Alternatively, gene therapy can also "turn off" a gene in the cell that is malfunctioning or causing damage (gene silencing). There are even processes like gene editing that use tools like CRISPR-Cas9 to edit or repair specific segments of faulty DNA!
As cancer is caused by a mutation in the genome, scientists have been and are currently researching gene therapy as a method to treat and "cure" certain forms of cancer. This, of course, can be done by targeting the malfunctioning genes in cancer that tell the cell to keep replicating, or functional, healthy versions of tumor suppressor genes can be introduced to cells who have lost their functional copy.
One example of a current gene therapy method used in cancer treatment is CAR T-cell therapy, which alters a patient's T cells (a lymphocyte, a type of specialized white blood cell) to turn them into killer cells that attack cancerous tumors.
