Gene therapy promises one-shot treatment for HIV

[n2doc]

18 February 2009 by Andy Coghlan
IMAGINE going into hospital with HIV and receiving a single treatment that knocks the virus on the head for good. That dream may come true sooner than we thought following a flurry of progress in gene therapy.

The story begins with a man in Germany who last week was reported to be free of HIV following a bone marrow transplant. The donor was known to have two copies of a gene that prevents HIV from invading white blood cells. For the first time, it may be possible to eliminate the virus from the body, as opposed to simply keeping it in check with antiretroviral therapies (ART).

Meanwhile, other researchers announced this week that they are making progress by altering a patient's own white blood cells to make them resistant to HIV. While still preliminary, these gene therapies could help more people with HIV than transplants could, as they don't rely on finding that rare compatible person who also happens to have the right genome.

The continuing failure of vaccines against HIV, and the disadvantages of ART, including their high cost, their toxicity, the difficulties of distributing them to people in developing countries and the impracticality of taking them every day for life, make these one-shot gene therapies all the more exciting.

Word first surfaced last November that a man had been "cured" of HIV through a bone marrow transplant, but this wasn't confirmed until last week, when the full results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine (vol 360, p 692). "It's now almost exactly two years ago that we treated him, and the virus is nowhere to be seen," says Gero Hütter of the Charité University of Medicine in Berlin, head of the team that treated the man.
more:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126964.400-gene-therapy-promises-oneshot-treatment-for-hiv.html

(I know the marrow replacement study has been posted before, but this is a nice synopsis of the field)

[tabatha]

1. Great news. So much suffering has been caused by HIV/AIDS.

[pleah]

2. K&R Good news.

[elfin]

3. Look for HIV resistant donors charging big bucks

and perhaps crippling the effort.

But this is reason for exaltation.

Perhaps stem cell replication of these resistant materials can help end the epidemic assaulting Africa and other areas.

[xchrom]

4. i'm going to recommend this with reservations.

what iread here sounds years and years off from becoming reality.

many cross the divide -- especially the poor beween here and this 'shot'.

[Liberal Veteran]

5. I have some ambivalence.

It could be great, but if my understanding is correct, they essentially gave him the CCR5 mutation.

As my limited knowledge goes, there are essentially two types of HIV isolates. There is CCR5 tropic and CXCR4 tropic isolates. CC5 tropic virus uses CCR5 receptors to bind to cells and infect them. The CCR5 mutation is like a faulty lock and the key that HIV uses to infect a cell cannot bind to those receptors to infect the cell.

If this can be used on people with only CC5 tropic virus, that would be a good thing, but people infected for some time tend to have CXCR4 tropic virus or dual-tropic virus as the dominate type and this wouldn't work for those people.