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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday November 12 2016, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the many-years-in-the-making dept.

A study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in collaboration with scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), Janssen Vaccines & Prevention B.V., one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson and Gilead Sciences, Inc., has demonstrated that combining an experimental vaccine with an innate immune stimulant may help lead to viral remission in people living with HIV. In animal trials, the combination decreased levels of viral DNA in peripheral blood and lymph nodes, and improved viral suppression and delayed viral rebound following discontinuation of anti-retroviral therapy (ART). The research team's findings appeared online today in the journal Nature.

"The objective of our study was to identify a functional cure for HIV -- not to eradicate the virus, but to control it without the need for ART," said lead author Dan Barouch, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at BIDMC. "Current antiretroviral drugs, although they're lifesaving, do not cure HIV. They merely hold it in check. We are trying to develop strategies to achieve ART-free, long-term viral suppression."

The finding would make an enormous difference in Africa where HIV is epidemic, if they can get an affordable treatment into the field.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @07:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @07:25AM (#425960)

    I hope you will still read this:

    Repetitive DNA sequences are abundant in a broad range of species, from bacteria to mammals, and they cover nearly half of the human genome. Repeats have always presented technical challenges for sequence alignment and assembly programs. Next-generation sequencing projects, with their short read lengths and high data volumes, have made these challenges more difficult. From a computational perspective, repeats create ambiguities in alignment and assembly, which, in turn, can produce biases and errors when interpreting results. Simply ignoring repeats is not an option, as this creates problems of its own and may mean that important biological phenomena are missed. We discuss the computational problems surrounding repeats and describe strategies used by current bioinformatics systems to solve them.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3324860/ [nih.gov]

    This is all "common knowledge" amongst the non-press-release researchers.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @02:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @02:57PM (#426047)

    None of this changes the fact that the human genome has been mapped. They're just trying to find faster ways to map the genomes (ie: perhaps map only the differences) or look for specific information without having to map every individuals entire genome every time because that's very time consuming and more expensive.

    Read the article. From your own link

    " Next-generation sequencing (NGS) machines can now sequence the entire human genome in a few days"

    The point is they want to be able to find a sequence without re-sequencing the entire genome every time or to only map the differences without mapping everything.

    "After sequencing a sample to deep coverage, it is possible to detect SNPs, copy number variants (CNVs) and other types of sequence variation without the need for de novo assembly."

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @07:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @07:06PM (#426101)

      The best way would have been to show you the long stretches of N's directly, but how about this:

      even the extensively studied human genome has not yet reached a complete, 'telomere-to-telomere', chromosome assembly.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26363799 [nih.gov]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:40AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:40AM (#431681)

        I see assembly as having a different meaning than sequence.