Gene therapy has been reviewed in several issues of CW. The principle of rendering tumor-stimulating genes ineffective or inserting functional tumor suppressor genes is very attractive, but the technicalities involved are very complex. So far, the choice of the vehicle, its acceptance by the host and the final effectiveness pose problems that have not been solved in a satisfactory way. A single ?therapeutic? gene that kills cancer cells only is probably utopian; slow progress is being made with the difficulty in getting the gene to or into every cancer cell. At the recent SG Gowen Global Health Conference (Seattle, November 2000), promising results with the novel tumor suppressor gene mda-7 have been announced.
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