Application of Biotechnology in Medicine – Imaluop

Hi, we are now going to discuss the application of biotechnology in medicine and their scope in medical sciences. Biotechnology is a scientific exploitation of living organisms for human welfare by their useful product. Biotechnology is exploitation at cellular and molecular level for various life sustaining products. 

Importance of Biotechnology: 

Biotechnology and its products are used in various fields like in medicine, agriculture for human welfare and we will discuss all uses of biotechnology below. 

Gene Therapy: 

Gene therapy is an application of biotechnology which is mostly used for treating most of the genetic disorders. Most of the genetic disorders are due to the presence of detective genes in our chromosomes which cause different types of harmful effects.

Gene therapy can correct those genes which are defective by replacing them with the correct gene and we use different types of vector to carry the gene upto the place where we want to replace the defective gene with the correct gene.  

We use different types of viruses to carry the gene in our body cells like adenovirus, herpes simplex virus which are examples of retrovirus.

Sometimes some of our genes remain in an inactive stage in our genome which cause different types of genetic disorders, then if we can replace the inactive gene with a normal gene in early stages of our life then it is possible to recover the genetic disorders permanently. 

Production of Recombinant Insulin: 

Glucose metabolism in diabetic patients is not normal because of various reasons and one major reason for this is insulin not being produced properly. Then we need to take synthetic insulin from outside and biotechnology is used to produce insulin on a large scale.

One alternative method for insulin production is, production of insulin in the pancreas of pig but it is not sufficient to meet the demand for insulin. So we use another alternative method of insulin production by biotechnology where we use clones of the human insulin gene. 

Then we incorporate the human insulin gene into the genome of Escherichia Coli and inside the bacterial genome human insulin gene can make its multiple copy within a very short time span and the insulin produced from the bacteria is extracted and purified for future use in diabetic patients.  

Molecular Diagnosis: 

Many diseases do not show its early symptoms but when it shows its symptoms it becomes out of control so early diagnosis is the only way to check them.

But in some diseases pathogens present in very small amounts in early stages so they are not detected in the diagnosis process but if we can amplify them then we can easily diagnose them.

Different techniques like ELISA, PCR can be applied to detect the minor presence of pathogen and antigen which helps us to diagnose those diseases in early stages. 

Production of Edible Vaccine: 

In most of the vaccines we use pathogenic antigen which cause stimulation in our immunity system. Most of the pathogenic antigen are proteinaceous and we can produce them if we can incorporate the antigenic gene into the genome of different organisms.

In modern days we introduce the antigenic gene into the genome of different food plants and the transgenic plants can be used as a source of pathogenic antigen. The antigen is also present in the edible part of the transgenic plants which can be used as an edible vaccine.  

Scopes of Biotechnology: 

Biotechnology can be used in all fields for human welfare, for example in agriculture we can produce different crops of higher yields, in animal husbandry we can use the knowledge of biotechnology to improve the quality of different animals which have great economic importance for high production. 

Reference: Application of Biotechnology in Medicine 

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