For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. The surprise success now confirms that a cure for H.I.V. infection is possible, if difficult, researchers said.
The investigators are to publish their report on Tuesday in the journal Nature and to present some of the details at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle.
Publicly, the scientists are describing the case as a long-term remission. In interviews, most experts are calling it a cure, with the caveat that it is hard to know how to define the word when there are only two known instances.
Both milestones resulted from bone-marrow transplants given to infected patients. But the transplants were intended to treat cancer in the patients, not H.I.V. Bone-marrow transplantation is unlikely to be a realistic treatment option in the near future. Powerful drugs are now available to control H.I.V. infection, while the transplants are risky, with harsh side effects that can last for years. But rearming the body with immune cells similarly modified to resist H.I.V. might well succeed as a practical treatment, experts said.
HIV-1 remission following CCR5Δ32/Δ32 haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1027-4) (DX)
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Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies
A Russian scientist says he is planning to produce gene-edited babies, an act that would make him only the second person known to have done this. It would also fly in the face of the scientific consensus that such experiments should be banned until an international ethical framework has agreed on the circumstances and safety measures that would justify them.
Molecular biologist Denis Rebrikov has told Nature he is considering implanting gene-edited embryos into women, possibly before the end of the year if he can get approval by then. Chinese scientist He Jiankui prompted an international outcry when he announced last November that he had made the world's first gene-edited babies — twin girls.
The experiment will target the same gene, called CCR5, that He did, but Rebrikov claims his technique will offer greater benefits, pose fewer risks and be more ethically justifiable and acceptable to the public. Rebrikov plans to disable the gene, which encodes a protein that allows HIV to enter cells, in embryos that will be implanted into HIV-positive mothers, reducing the risk of them passing on the virus to the baby in utero. By contrast, He modified the gene in embryos created from fathers with HIV, which many geneticists said provided little clinical benefit because the risk of a father passing on HIV to his children is minimal.
[...] "The technology is not ready," says Jennifer Doudna, a University of California Berkeley molecular biologist who pioneered the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing system that Rebrikov plans to use. "It is not surprising, but it is very disappointing and unsettling."
Alta Charo, a researcher in bioethics and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says Rebrikov's plans are not an ethical use of the technology. "It is irresponsible to proceed with this protocol at this time," adds Charo, who sits on a World Health Organization committee that is formulating ethical governance policies for human genome editing.
Third time's the charm? I guess they won't pick a genetic disease to target instead since preimplantation genetic diagnosis can already handle that. Others will have to resort to gene therapy after the child is born.
Previously: Chinese Scientist Claims to Have Created the First Genome-Edited Babies (Twins)
Furor Over Genome-Edited Babies Claim Continues (Updated)
Chinese Gene-Editing Scientist's Project Rejected for WHO Database (Plus: He Jiankui is Missing)
Chinese Scientist Who Allegedly Created the First Genome-Edited Babies is Reportedly Being Detained
China Confirms That He Jiankui Illegally Edited Human Embryo Genomes
China's CRISPR Babies Could Face Earlier Death
Related: HIV Reportedly Cured In A Second Patient
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:38PM (10 children)
My pastor says he knew as long ago as 1985 that the cure for HIV was to not be homosexual or Haitian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:52PM (7 children)
It originated in chimpanzees... The earliest known case of infection with HIV-1 in a human was detected in a blood sample collected in 1959 from a man in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (How he became infected is not known.)
Uh...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)
Did this man or his pet chimpanzee travel to Haiti?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @01:54AM
Why did you fuck and infect his chimpanzee you fucking weirdo!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:34PM (4 children)
Nope, now the theory is that it has transferred from monkeys/apes to humans over a dozen times:
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/081101_hivorigins [berkeley.edu]
So this virus that is nearly impossible to transmit from person-to-person is being transmitted from other species to humans once every couple years? Also, this:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=12103&cid=302121#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:38PM (3 children)
From a skim of Wikipedia, it sounds like the theory is that people who deal with bushmeat in Africa pretty commonly end up with the monkey version of the disease (SIV), but it needs to be quickly passed from host to host several times in humans before it manages to mutate into HIV. So they think it just became a thing in the 20th century because it took that long for human living arrangements to get to that point, with people living in close enough contact in cities with lots of prostitutes and stuff.
Low rate of transmission doesn't really matter if a sufficiently large population is exposing themselves to it on a regular basis. Don't most STDs only have a transmission rate of like 10%?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:43PM (2 children)
Whoops, forgot the link I was going to use.
link [wikipedia.org]
Also under "Origins":
As an aside, they really didn't make it easy to find in that article. The heck is "tropism", and how many people know that definition? I found it by doing a page search on "transmission."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:57PM
A turning, or what does the subject turn towards? Tropic (turn of axial tilt), trope (turning a phrase), tropism (bacteria/virus turns/prefers what cells?), heliotropic (turn towards the sun), hydrotropic (root turns towards the water). Same root.
But I love word origins, a logotropist of the first order.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:03PM
The HIV article is focused on the virus (virology) while the AIDS article is focused on the disease (epidemiology/physiology).
Tropism is a virology term that classifies viruses based on the types of cells they can infect (e.g. T-tropic infects T cells, M-tropic infects macrophages, anthro-tripic infects human cells)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HIV/AIDS&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop#Transmission [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:57PM (1 child)
Go on admit it, your pastor is Ted. [wikipedia.org]
Not that I'm judging. If he wants to take drugs and have sex with dudes, that's his business. Plenty of evangelicals do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:00AM
It's kind of hypocritical still to first bash gays in the public and then take it in the ass in private. And don't even get me started on child molesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @09:56PM (5 children)
If they want anyone to read this they would put it on SciHub. I get zero results there.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:02PM (1 child)
Yeah. Or you could, you know, pay for the article or subscribe to the journal if you have a real reason to follow the articles. (Or your institution can).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:52PM
Spoken like someone who only rarely reads articles. Institutional access is so inferior to SciHub it isn't funny. I could log in that way if I wanted but why when it takes like 10x longer to get each article?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:24PM (2 children)
Right, because nobody has access to Nature, the most widely read and disseminated scientific journal in the world. In all seriousness though, most libraries have subscriptions to Nature, as the institutional rate to subscribe is based on various factors, like number of patrons, access numbers, budget, and scales from free to tens of thousands of dollars.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:48PM (1 child)
I already paid once for this research, why would I act the sucker and pay again to a useless middleman?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:32PM
So Daniel Ropers and other parasites [wikipedia.org] can get paid.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:41PM (4 children)
As I recall part of the bone marrow transplant process is to give immunosuppressants to allow the graft to take hold. Effectively this kills whatever immunity the person had left, and is why there is a quarantine period in a hospital ward that staff is trained up one side and down the other on hygiene. One of the main points to current HIV therapy is to preserve what leukocytes and production remain and not let them be killed by the virus. So to take the risk on new bone marrow being able to produce new leukocytes one has to destroy what's left of the body's defenses - that sounds risky indeed. Which is why these were "accidental" cures, if cures they are. I'd be worried about the term of remission and that the patient still has the virus which could learn to munch on the new immune system. But wow!
It will be interesting to see what success rates might be achievable with this. 2 cases is nowhere near the universe one needs to establish efficacy. Exciting stuff, though.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:21PM (1 child)
And it might just be that simple. If HIV only infects the T-Cells and you destroy the entire immune system and keep it gone longer than the virus can exist free floating, it is gone. But you would need a 100.00% kill rate for that to work. With only the two examples it is hard to say much.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:02PM
Very true. No food, predator dies. Trick being to keep the host alive while it has no defense against anything else, either. (Well, limited defense as primary defenses are still up, one hopes.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @02:07AM (1 child)
In both cases of a "cure," the standard bone marrow donation protocols were followed, since the risk to the patient wasn't that much higher than their advanced AIDS. In addition, the donors were from a population of people who seem naturally immune to HIV, for some reason. Therefore, once the immune system from the grafts got established, it was able to fight off the HIV in the body. The problem with this cure protocol is that, theoretically speaking, the risk of GVHD is much higher due to the transplant specifics; however there are no actual studies of that, of course.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:41PM
The mutated form of CCR5, which is a co-receptor that HIV uses to enter cells, is thought to have increased in frequency due to selective pressure from a combination of smallpox and the Black Death plague.
As for the problems of GVHD, there are multiple clinical trials that are in progress where bone marrow is taken from the patient, genetically modified to remove or suppress CCR5, then re-introduced into the patient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#Positive_selection [wikipedia.org]
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=HIV+AIDS&term=+CCR5+gene+therapy&cntry=&state=&city=&dist= [clinicaltrials.gov]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:55PM
Like it's 1970?