
The first drug is created against a rare disease that makes bones as compact as marble and at the same time too fragile to break. The final approval for clinical experimentation in the USA is now awaited.
The project started 15 years ago at the initiative of the European Commission, and a number of scientific universities, mainly Italian.
Experts explain that in our organism, a physiological system guarantees the elimination of old bone fibers and their replacement with new ones, renewing the skeleton up to 10 times throughout life. In the case of dominant osteoporosis, this mechanism does not work regularly because the cells that eliminate the old part of the bone with the new one are not active.
Thus the conceived drug regulates the formation of proteins by means of genes and mutations, using RNA, and so far it has worked very well in both cell and animal tests.