OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Based on the most recent estimates, there are over 10,000 known human diseases, and more are being discovered each day. A large fraction of these are rare monogenic (Mendelian) disorders. Gene-targeted therapies, such as gene therapy, gene editing, and oligonucleotides are therapeutic platforms that are broadly applicable to a large fraction of monogenic diseases. However, these technologies are currently developed as treatments for one disease at a time. This approach favors the most common rare diseases, and will leave many diseases and patients who could greatly benefit from gene targeted therapies behind. To address this disparity, a fundamentally different way of thinking about the problem is required. One potential solution, based on the science itself, is to develop gene-targeted therapies as therapeutic platforms to treat monogenic disease, rather than as treatments for one disease at a time. I will discuss the implications and challenges of this approach and provide examples of ongoing research in this area. See pave-gt.ncats.nih.gov ; fnih.org/our-programs/AMP/BGTC ; commonfund.nih.gov/editing .