Molecular Therapy

Localized Molecular Therapy (MT) is the cellular modifications at the molecular level. Take the chemotherapy in oncology for example, it aims to kill the cell by delivering toxic agents to the cell, while MT could aim to terminate the cellular division without necessarily killing the cell, such as aiming to reach senescence whose therapeutic procedure, levels of toxic agents, and tools for delivering the toxicity could all be very different from simply killing the cell. An example of the senescence therapy could be the delivering of 77BrdC to a Herpes specific gene responsible for certain cancer transformation. Helson and Wang applied the radioactive bromide compound that has a K-capture decay mode leading to a mega Gray (Gy) dose with Auger electrons in Situ [1] at the DNA level that terminates the cellular division and drives the cell into a state of senescence. But the mega Gy dose is limited to a dimension of a few nanometers so that while it modifies both of the DNA duplexes, it does not interrupt other cellular apparatus sufficiently to kill the cell. This in Vitro work was carried out at Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in the 1970s, and the work was not published as it was meant to be the beginning program of an extensive clinical trial. The Auger dose in mega Gy can be found in Wikipedia under Auger Therapy [1].