one behind the ear...
Posted on 09/19/2011 1:35:27 PM PDT by Red Badger
A technique that alters T cells has been shown to reduce the amount of virus in infected people.
For the first time, researchers have shown that a cell-based therapy for HIV/AIDS can reduce the amount of virus in infected people. The breakthrough—big news for researchers, who have struggled for decades to create vaccines and cell-based therapies for HIV—was announced on Sunday at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Chicago. To date, the sole treatment for HIV has been multidrug regimens that prolong life but never eliminate the virus.
Sangamo BioSciences of Richmond, California, says it has found a way to protect the T cells that HIV attacks first, so they can live to fight another day. The approach entails temporarily stopping a patient's antiretroviral therapy and removing T cells carrying the CD4 receptor. This surface protein is the doorway by which the virus gains entry into the cell. The collected T cells are exposed to zinc finger nuclease, an enzyme designed to remove the gene for a coreceptor of CD4 called CCR5. The cells are then reinfused into the patient. Once they're back in the body, the new study shows, the cells persist and travel in the body just like normal T cells.
Sangamo's approach is based on the observation that some people have a naturally occurring mutation in the CCR5 gene that protects them against HIV. Ordinarily, humans have two copies of every gene. It turns out that individuals with a mutation in both copies of the CCR5 gene cannot be infected by the most common HIV strains. In people with the so-called Delta-32 mutation in just one copy of the gene, infection rarely progresses to AIDS. In the U.S., about 1 percent of the population is thought to carry the helpful mutation, which some researchers believe arose as protection against the Black Death.
Previous evidence existed showing that CCR5-negative cells could help AIDS patients. In 2007, an American man with AIDS and lymphoma received, as treatment for the cancer, a bone-marrow transplant from a person with the CCR5 mutation. The marrow recipient has been free of both AIDS and cancer since then. Sangamo's method treats a patient's own cells, with less risk than a marrow transplant.
"The data are very encouraging," says Edward Lanphier, Sangamo's founding CEO. "We are seeing a statistically significant correlation between our treatment and viral load reduction. This is a big step forward toward our goal of developing a functional cure for the disease." Lanphier envisions that someday AIDS patients will not need to be on aggressive antiretroviral therapies because their virus will be well-controlled—or even undetectable, as happened with one subject with a mutation in one CCR5 gene.
Experts unaffiliated with Sangamo and its clinical trials agree that the scientific achievement is impressive, but they question the notion that it could yield a functional cure. Gerhard Bauer, assistant professor in the Stem Cell Program at the University of California, Davis, and director of that school's Good Manufacturing Practice laboratory at the Institute for Regenerative Cures, says, "this is a great move forward, to demonstrate reduction of viral load by pushing in modified T cells. It has never been done before by any company, and I congratulate them 100 percent."
America's first gay president is pleased. Fire up the teleprompter.
Of course, the child is not promiscuous. How did the child become HIV+? Is the blood supply contaminated?
Here in the States Gays and drug users >chose< their lifestyle and accept the risks and consequences.
It is, after all, a preventable disease here.
A person who gets it (or got it) from a blood transfusion is completely innocent.
The family was traveling in Europe when the child suffered an injury requiring a blood transfusion. Some Western European countries are surprisingly not very good at screening their blood donors. In this case, it was the Netherlands.
It is supposed to be very rare (if not impossible) for anyone here in the States to get it through a blood transfusion. Sounds like this is not true?
And that would make the people who contaiminate the blood supply murders. Unfortunately, they'd probably succumb before you could try them.
Homosexuals are the new protected class of the Left so the cure for their fully preventable disease got tons of money—money that could have gone to illnesses that are not the result of unsanitary depravity.
All the billions thrown at aids—several real diseases could have been cured with that kind of money.As far as I am concerned,homosexual activists have oceans of blood on their hands.
Part of the problem is “collateral infections” - someone who doesn’t know their partner’s other activities who gets infected, such as the wife of a cheating husband or vice versa.
It’s a long and nasty chain, and the end victims don’t necessarily need to have even had the opportunity to choose risky behavior.
Should we not try to help them?
Also, blood screening? Not 100% accurate everywhere.
Darn! What a sad story.
My first reaction is sadness and then anger!
See post 22, it wasn’t State-side. That said, even in the US there are isolated incidents of this happening.
That is terrible!
It is all a game of the odds — the more partners you have the increased chance that you'll get it. And if you hang out with the wild crowd or your friends hang out with the wild crowd, then your chances are increased of getting it.
Better to be monogamous. I can confidently say that I won't get it. My chances are very slim that I might get it from a blood transfusion. I am not worried.
If I was into the bathouse scene or liked prostitutes, then I'd be worried.
However, I do pity the poor innocent person who gets it. And I loathe the person who gave it to him or her.
Then I am not worried. I can confidently say that I won’t get AIDS.
I am much more likely to die from Cancer or Heart Disease.
Heck, getting struck by lightning is probably more likely.
one behind the ear...
Well, with those numbers, they are going to have to find a way to streamline marriage and divorce to where both of them take about 5 minutes each. I read somewhere that they used to do that for black people back in the Jim Crow days because they couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer for a divorce, sooo the couple would go to the judge’s office, say “I Divorce You” 3 times while turning around in a circle, and they were divorced. Maybe they can bring this back for gay people???
JOhnson gave up the anal sex and destructive lifestyle.
HIV causes AIDS, but also needs drug use, bacteria injected through tears in the ass, etc, to wear the body down to become AIDS.
No argument that promiscuity massively increases the odds of getting this disease, but your partner needs to be monogamous as well and as we all know that doesn’t always happen.
It’s also worth noting that if we crack HIV, we can also crack a number of other retrovirii, some of which cause cancer and are transmitted through unclear means.
“That’s nice, but I have a friend whose child is a hemophiliac. Who now has HIV. The child is 8. Are you honestly saying that the child has been promiscuous?”
There has not been a recorded case of an hemophiliac in the USA becoming infected with HIV by blood transfusion since 1986.
In fact, since 1999, new technology has allowed clotting factors to be genetically engineered without the use of blood donations, so this is a non-issue.
http://www.humanillnesses.com/original/Gas-Hep/Hemophilia.html#ixzz1YRERvIg7
1. I disagree. It is the basic rule of any infectious disease. Maybe a quarantine is in order for those who are infected. That is what the do when there is a serious outbreak of any other virus. For some reason, not HIV/AIDS. I wonder why? Yes, many don't know that they are infected. But those who do know that they are infected?
2. With limited monetary resources, the money spent on AIDS here in the States could be used on more serious diseases — that are NOT preventable. Then again, it is a serious problem in Africa. Who knows.
Psst - wasn’t the US.
Why worry about Marriage at all.
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