Developing a Permanent Treatment for Lactose Intolerance Using Gene Therapy

2018-02-12

[public] 399K views, 32.8K likes, 443 dislikes audio only

For more than half a decade I've suffered from lactose intolerance. If I consumed even the smallest amounts of lactose I'd be violently ill within the hour. So as I was choosing my university I vowed that one day I'd fix it.

Recently my friend Gabriel Licina, renowned biohacker and genetic engineer, gave me access to the tools and materials I needed to make a therapy that could potentially fix the issue. The therapy uses a virus called an AAV to deliver DNA that codes for the enzyme that breaks down lactose. When packaged into a pill and ingested, the virus should induce my intestine to produce lactase, effectively restoring lactose tolerance.

This project was based on research done by other scientists and I've included links to all the papers below. I've also included links to all of the places I got the viral DNA kits from. The other reagents and media were all purchased from the thermofisher catalogue.

I'm also working on a writeup of this procedure and will hopefully publish a paper on the results once I've collected more data. I know that so far my sample size is still only N=1 but my life has changed from this project and I wanted to share my progress. I'm not going to make any claims about the project other than my life seems to have improved.

This is for educational purposes only. Do not attempt anything you see, unless you are an experienced biologist.

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Resources:

Original paper: http://sci-hub.se/10.1038/2625

pAAVLacz Plasmid: https://www.cellbiolabs.com/paav-lacz-control-plasmid

AAV kit: https://www.cellbiolabs.com/aav-2-cmv-expression-system

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