By Anthony O. Miller
A SON of Cyprus came home yesterday to cement ties between the island and Australia that he hopes will one day produce a cure for thalassaemia, a genetic blood disorder afflicting some 600 Cypriots and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
Dr. Panos Ioannou held court at the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics yesterday for the signing of an agreement between the Institute and the Murdoch Institute in Melbourne, Australia, to allow the sharing of expertise against the illness.
Ioannou, 47, was chosen earlier this year to head the Gene Therapy Group at the Murdoch institute. Key to his selection was his pioneering work in thalassaemia prevention and treatment over the last 20 years in Cyprus, which has been at the forefront of medical efforts to combat the genetic disorder.
His work included establishing the Prenatal Diagnosis Laboratory for thalassaemia, first at the Cyprus Thalassaemia Centre, and later at the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics.
With this background, it was natural that genetic research into the causes and possible cures for the disease would become a major research focus of the Murdoch Institute.
Armed with Murdoch’s deep pockets and its cutting-edge technologies, Ioannou said he hoped to engineer a “technology transfer” from his Australian laboratories to the Gene Therapy Group being set up at the Institute of Neurology and Genetics.
This will involve not only country-to-country co-ordination of gene therapy research into thalassaemia, but also invitations to Cypriot scientists to hone their genetic-engineering skills against the ailment by training at the Murdoch Institute.
Ioannou said he made the painful decision to leave Cyprus for Australia because he felt current “prevention strategy (involving prenatal diagnosis) combined with abortion, is not the final solution for thalassaemia.”
“Abortion is not ethically acceptable to many families” faced with having a child with the life-wasting disease, “and not the logically acceptable solution to the problem,” he said.
However, he said advances in understanding human genetics could well produce experimental cures “within 10 years.” These, he insisted, would only be experimental, and nowhere near marketable on a mass scale.
Such “cures” might involve removing bone marrow cells from an afflicted foetus, or those of a person already stricken by the disease; manipulating the cells chemically or physically; and reinserting the treated cells into the bone marrow stem cells.
Far from being a needle-in-a-haystack search – “there are three billion elements in a person’s genetic code” – the procedure operates at only the molecular level, and is already being used to treat some cancers and genetic diseases, Ioannou noted.
And pharmacological “cures”, he continued, could involve the use of laboratory animals to produce medicines either to correct the genetic defect causing thalassaemia, or to neutralise its effect on the body.
Without treatment, a person afflicted with thalassaemia – which prevents the body from eliminating iron from the bloodstream – would not live beyond five or 10 years of age, Ioannou said.
However, current treatment permits Cypriots and others afflicted to live into their 40s, he said, adding that current prevention techniques had reduced the island’s thalassaemic birth rate to some 70 children per year.
This equates to a birthrate of about “one per thousand population,” he said.
“Without prevention, the number could be one in 60 births per year” in Cyprus alone, he added.
The disorder afflicts about 100,000 newborns each year worldwide, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures Ioannou cited. Its victims are found mainly throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, through the temperate and tropical zones of Africa, and into Southeast Asia and Central China, he said.
