VEGF is, as I say, is the first gene in the cascade of developing new blood vessels, it also happens to be... it's not an accident but it is... it is a protein which protects neurons. A neuro-protective. I was surprised when I first came across this but it turns out, if I'd remembered by histology, the paths of blood vessels and nerves are very similar, they follow the same tracks and so VEGF is neuroprotective and there's quite a number of diseases, Lou Gehrig's Disease, ALS and things like that, motor neurone disease where there diseases are these neurons and people have started... made trials using VEGF itself. Just adding VEGF to motor neurone disease, well, the obvious thing to do is to just switch on VEGF which is a natural gene which hasn't been, it's not harmed in this case because the defect isn't in that gene so it's probably going to be used for neuro protection, so that will be another application of VEGF. And one can think of many other applications, I've thought of several where to switch an endogenous gene which can help, which can help cure, not necessarily diseases, but even things like muscle injury. If you injure a muscle then you have problems with it, creating the nerves growing back and the blood vessels and so on and people find that IGF which is insulin-like growth factor, a lot of people add that to the muscles and that helps to repair, helps to grow again. Well, the obvious thing to do is to switch on the IGF gene in the cells. So I can think up lots of applications but we can't do them all, so I think I'll end there. At least for the... I wrote a paper for a Nobel Symposium last October when these results were beginning to appear, it was only a mini review, but they said that the results are astonishing. Because this has transformed the subject from getting... a few percent or fractions of a percent success by what they used to call gene targeting, where you only had the homologous DNA you didn't have any cuts, you didn't make the cuts and didn't have targeted cuts compared to what they now get, so I do think it's a... well, it's very gratifying to me to see this development. I'd always thought that the gene... that the zinc fingers would be a very useful research tool, but I must say I didn't think... at the time, the early days in 1994, that it could actually be possible therapeutic in serious diseases.
