Gene therapy has lived through lots of false horizons. The goal of this approach to treating genetic disease or infection has been to prevent manufacture of defective proteins or proteins that are key to infection in hard to treat (e.g. viral) diseases. It has also been realised that in many cases you need to make the correct (normal) protein. Conventional drug approaches are being tried. In the case of cystic fibrosis there have been attempts, with some success, to enable defective proteins to do their job through drug treatments that help overcome the defect. Read more