Caution: Panel cochairman Arno Motulsky says gene therapy "has great promise" but notes "many hurdles it needs to overcome."
"Much of what they said was right in the sense that there is a lot of basic research to be done, and it doesn't help to be hyping the field," says Alan Smith, senior vice president of research at Genzyme Corp., a publicly held gene therapy company in Cambridge, Mass. "On the other hand, part of running a business is getting funded, and hype wouldn't be unheard of. The biotech industry was accused of that in the beginning." "Academic and commercial-based gene therapy programs will likely have different reactions to the report," predicts James Wilson, director of the Institute for Human Gene Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Wilson, who is also a founder of and consultant to Genovo Inc., a gene therapy startup based in Philadelphia, says it ...
