Gene therapy is lagging, a pioneer of the field says

Gene therapy is not where it ought to be — or so says Dr. James Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania researcher who happens to have also pioneered the technology in the 1990s. Wilson, as he put it at the STAT Summit, is “somewhat disappointed where we are.”

Wilson finds it “kind of embarrassing” that vectors discovered in 2003 are the current gold stand standard for today’s gene therapies. The technologies we’re using today in gene therapy, he said, will be a far cry from those that will be used in the next few years.

When “we look back on the way we’re executing gene therapy now, we’re going to realize that things are going to be very different,” Wilson said. “The way in which we’re going to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy, potentially cure it, is not the way in which it’s being evaluated in the clinic now.”