Scientists have taken steps towards altering the course of devastating disorders such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and some cancers by discovering a new way of changing the genetic code, according to research.

The discovery has been hailed as “the new miracle of modern medicine” that could be used to stop people getting certain potentially fatal genetic diseases.

The genetic code is the set of instructions that tell a cell how to make a specific protein, and central to the body’s protein production process is messenger RNA, which takes these instructions from DNA and directs the steps necessary to build a protein.

For the first time, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Centre, New York state, artificially modified mRNA, and changed the original instructions for creating the protein. This results in a different protein than originally called for, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

Chairman of the university’s biochemistry and biophysics department Robert Bambara said: “The ability to manipulate the production of a protein from a particular gene is the new miracle of modern medicine.”

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