biotech lecture 1

• Red or healthcare biotechnology


  Applied to medical and food science processes
• Processes of healthcare biotechnology

  • Molecular diagnostic techniques
  • Development of vaccines
  • Development of antibiotics
  • Development of new drugs
  • Production of biological molecules for therapeutic purposes (such as hormones and antibodies)
• Gene therapy


  Modification of the genetic material of cells for treating diseases or disorders
• Transgenic animals as bioreactors


  Production of pharmacological proteins in milk of farm animals
• Importance of biotechnology in health

  • To develop products for human health (Biotech drugs and development of product services)
  • For the molecular diagnostics
  • For the treatment or prevention of disease
  • Help reduce disease transmission from new vaccines
  • Use in forensic through DNA profiling
• Products for human health

  • Antibodies
  • Proteins
  • Recombinant DNA Products
• Antibodies


  Proteins produced by white blood cells and used by the immune system to identify and fight bacteria, viruses, and other foreign substances
• Proteins


  Large, complex molecules that do most of the work in cells and are required for the structure, function, and regulation of the body's tissues and organs
• Recombinant DNA Products


  Genetically engineered DNA created by recombining fragments of DNA from different organisms
• Examples of Recombinant DNA Products

  • Recombinant DNA Vaccines
  • Recombinant DNA Drugs
  • Recombinant DNA Enzymes
  • Recombinant DNA Growth Hormone
  • Recombinant DNA Insulin
  • Recombinant DNA Proteins
  • Recombinant DNA Yeast
• Molecular diagnostics


  A collection of techniques used to analyze biological markers in the genome and proteome, and how their cells express their genes as proteins, applying molecular biology to medical testing
• Examples of Genetic/Molecular Testing/Genetic Engineering

  • Forensic/Identity testing
  • Determining sex
  • Conformational diagnosis of symptomatic individuals
  • New-born screening
  • Prenatal diagnostic screening
  • Correcting genetic defects
  • Treating diseases
  • Preventing the spread of disease
  • Altering genome
• Vaccines


  A biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease, often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe or its toxins
• How vaccines work


  1. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize it as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that the immune system can more easily identify and destroy any of these microorganisms that it encounters later

  2. Vaccinated people produce antibodies that neutralize a disease-causing virus or bacterium. They are much less likely to become infected and transmit those germs to others
• Antibiotics


  Powerful medicines that fight bacterial infections by either killing bacteria or stopping them from reproducing, allowing the body's natural defenses to eliminate the pathogens
• Chemotherapy


  The use of potent drugs or chemicals, often in combinations or intervals, to kill or damage cancer cells in the body
• Radiation therapy


  Can be used to treat leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, and myelodysplastic syndromes by damaging the genetic material (DNA) within cells, preventing them from growing and reproducing
• Immunotherapies being used or studied to treat blood cancer

  • Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy
  • Cytokine treatment
  • Donor lymphocyte infusion
  • Monoclonal antibody therapy
  • Radioimmunotherapy
  • Reduced-intensity allogeneic stem cell transplantation
  • Therapeutic cancer vaccines
• Stem cells


  Blood stem cells produced in the bone marrow that can become any kind of blood cell the body needs, constantly dividing and maturing into different types of blood cells to replace older and worn-out blood cells
• Stem cell transplantation


  A procedure in which a patient receives healthy stem cells to replace damaged stem cells, usually in the form of a bone marrow transplantation or from umbilical cord blood
• Tissue Nano-transfection (TNT)


  An electroporation-based technique capable of gene and drug cargo delivery or transfection at the nanoscale, considered a scaffold-less tissue engineering technique that can be cell-only or tissue inducing
• Tissue engineering


  The practice of combining scaffolds, cells, and biologically active molecules into functional tissues to restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues or whole organs
• Gene therapy


  The process in which a faulty gene is removed or replaced with its healthy copy to restore the normal function of that gene, including replacing a mutated gene that causes disease, inactivating or "knocking out" a mutated gene that is functioning improperly, or introducing a new gene that helps fight a disease