as well as to kill existing cancer cells. doing some basic research I found out that genetic engineering is being used to fight cancer, but they re-engineer the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells. Why not re-engineer the mutated cells themselves?
In: Biology
You might be able to do something along those lines, but keep in mind that cancer cells are cells with broken DNA. Altering the DNA doesn’t matter. It can still break. You can paint the vase any colors you like, but it still shatters when it hits the floor.
If you take the cancer cells out of the body and re-engineer them, then they die, or at least stop growing. But since they are no longer inside the body, them dying is not helpful. You could just dump bleach on them; it would be a lot cheaper and just as effective.
The ones still in the body that you missed when taking out the others are still alive, and still cause the disease.
Cancer cells grow extremelly fast and have a lot of advantages over healthy cells. If you want to fix those cells you’d have to fix all of them at the same time. That’s not an easy task. If you just fix a few cells at once the cancer cells will just keep on growing and those new “fixed” cells will just die anyway.
Plus there’s a bunch of things that are wrong with cancer cells, and by that I mean a lot of mutations. It’s easy to fix one mutation, but fixing a bunch of mutations at once… not so much. That’s why gene therapy works for diseases that are caused by one mutation in the genome. It’s useless against diseases with more than one mutation.
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