I share your frustration and concern but lets not go "belly up" on gene therapy just yet. No evidence to implicate gene therapy has yet been presented and out of 600 people treated with AAV, this is the first SAE. Remember this trial uses doses of its AAV product that are 100 to 1000 times greater than the recent Neurologix trial.

Then we finally get some payback for having a brain disease in the form of the brain's immune privilege.

"Immune privilege is an experimentally defined phenomenon in which certain sites and certain tissues and organs fail to obey the rules of transplantation immunology. Foreign tissue grafts placed in immune privileged sites (e.g. the brain) enjoy extended, often indefinite, survival, whereas similar grafts placed at conventional body sites (skin, beneath kidney capsule) are rapidly rejected".

As a result our AAV product comes largely under the radar of the body's immune system meaning the chances of immune reactions such as the tragic event listed below are further reduced.

All gene therapy is not the same, neither are the conditions for which it is intended. Given the choice I face of advanced PD or throwing my lot in a 600 to 1 shot (even ignoring all I have written above), I will go for the gene therapy option.

Neil.

p.s. Tena, what happened to Michel Lévesque and his work ?