Gene healing in a lotion? Researchers say they're close ~ MSNBC

[mzmolly]

By Brian Alexander

Most people who buy cosmetic lotions and potions know that while the people working behind the department store makeup counters may wear white lab coats, the stuff they sell is more about packaging than science.

But a Northwestern University team is bucking that image, reporting today that they’ve created a way to regulate genes affecting the skin -- merely by applying moisturizer.

Not only could their technology pave the way for cosmetics that actually work, but it also might also prove to be a valuable weapon in fighting melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, or diseases like psoriasis, and wounds like the intractable sores that often plague diabetics.

“This is a blockbuster in the ways we will treat diseases of the skin,” said Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern said. “We’re talking about ailments, scarring, wound healing, ways of regulating them or retarding them.”

In a research paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mirkin and his colleagues describe not a drug, exactly, but a way of delivering small sections of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA are nucleic acids) called short interfering RNA, or siRNA, to cells. The cells take up the siRNA, which then alters the way a gene inside each cell can be read by the protein-making system.

More at MSNBC

[d_r]

1. sounds promising

this has the potential to bring relief to many people who have painful skin disorders - I hope that the research pans out.