Two weeks later, at the Magic Research Institute, Andrew Tuke had finished preparing the transgenic adenovirus.
"We've already carried out preliminary experimental verification. Elderly mice injected with the transgenic adenovirus showed improvements across all functional levels compared with their peers, and their degree of aging dropped by about 9%."
"9%? That low?"
"Due to immune effects, non-replicating viruses suffer relatively heavy losses, but excessive dosing causes severe inflammatory responses, while repeated dosing runs into the same immune issues. The results have never been ideal."
In vitro experiments had shown an anti-aging effect of around 30%, but once it reached animal trials, only 9% remained. When it truly entered the human body, whether the thing could still have any effect at all was another question.
Still, this was the norm in the pharmaceutical industry. A clinical environment and an in vitro experiment were two completely different concepts. In vitro, every drug was a miracle drug, but the complexity of the internal environment was countless orders of magnitude higher, and a drug's effects were often heavily discounted.
"Have the replicating viruses been prepared?" Murphy asked again.
A transgenic virus was still a virus. If it were allowed to replicate freely inside the body, there was no telling what unpredictable consequences it might cause. For that reason, gene therapy used replication-defective viruses, making them one-use tools with relatively high safety and basically no major side effects.
But judging from the current results, non-replicating viruses were clearly unlikely to have an effective impact, so Murphy planned to use replicating viruses directly for the Seed of the Mind experiment.
"They're ready."
Soon, Murphy arrived at the laboratory.
Because they needed to use the Seed of the Mind, the experimental subjects could not be mice.
This time, they had found forty Gnomes. All of them had