Biotech Values

[poorgradstudent]

Re: VEGF for heart disease:

>The part I don’t get is “…without a requirement of incorporation…” in the paragraph below.<

My bet is that they included such language to calm fears regarding the random insertion of the plasmid into the genome. Such a random insertion could be very problematic, as you may imagine.

These types of plasmids can work in a stand-alone manner because they will have a promoter in front of the gene of interest. That will allow the gene of interest (VEGF-2 in this case) to be expressed. Absent a promoter, the gene of interest would not be expressed because the coding sequence of the gene, by itself, can not recruit the transcriptional machinery.