A recent study has found that gene therapy is effective in curbing fibroids in mice. Dr. Ayman Al-Hendy and other researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas conducted the study. They found that treating uterine fibroids with targeted gene therapy to deactivate estrogen receptors can reverse the effects of fibroids.
Uterine fibroids are non-cancerous tumors that grow inside the uterus, or in the lining or muscular wall. They can cause severe pain, heavy bleeding, urinary and bowel symptoms, back pain, and infertility or repeated miscarriage. They are “fed” by a healthy blood supply to the area and the hormone estrogen, necessary for the female reproductive process to go smoothly, causes them to grow. Thus, if doctors can stop either blood-flow or estrogen, fibroids will shrink and/or die.
Taking this information into consideration, Al-Hendy and colleagues grew fibroid tissue under the skin of mice for two to three weeks, then injected the growths with a specially engineered “delivery” virus that transferred a mutated estrogen receptor gene, incapable of processing the hormone in the tissue that had it.
They found that after only a week, mice that had received the gene had significantly smaller fibroids than mice that had not. Also, experiments with fibroid cells grown in Petri dishes showed that treatment with the gene therapy stopped cell growth and induced cell death.
Fibroids are an especially good target for gene therapy, noted the team, because they are easy to locate and inject, and involve a specific, self-contained area of tissue. Also, it is not necessary for fibroids to be completely removed or expelled from the body to stop causing bothersome and painful symptoms – they must simply decrease in size so that they no longer interfere with normal reproductive and other processes.
Al-Handy said that, if made ready for human patients, the treatment “should not interfere with the fertility potential of the patient,” adding that patients who want to become pregnant “represent a group [fibroid treatment specialists] have failed so far.”
Indeed, these findings are especially good news for women who have fibroids and hope to retain their fertility while alleviating and eliminating fibroids and their symptoms. By making the fibroids go away with a little chemical “nudging,” while also doing nothing to change hormones in the rest of the body, doctors would be able to treat fibroids without potentially rendering women infertile due to either physical interference in the uterus, or hormonal interference in the case of orally administered or injected hormonal therapy, which are absorbed by the whole body, including, of course, the reproductive organs.
Since women are bearing children later and later in life due to career and financial goals and constraints, and fibroids tend to strike in the late reproductive years, many fibroids patients have not yet had children, and would like to. While current fibroid treatments are far more advanced and effective than where they were 20, 10, or even five years ago, most still offer no promises about preserving fertility. Gene therapy techniques, if effective in human patients, would provide a much-needed option to many women.
