Stem Cell Transplant Patient HIV-Free

Wow...funny, HIV is not a gay disease...really, it isn't funny...Have some compassion...This disease changes lives and is frightening. Where is your humanity? I am a woman and I am Positive. Positive by a straight man who was infected by a straight woman who was infected by her husband who was a drug addict. I am lucky, I can trace my infection. I am also fortunate enough to be educated and well informed and able to take care of myself in the best way possible. This disease, like any disease is frightening. I believe that stem cell research is wonderful. I don't agree with abortion for the research...or creating babies in a dish for the research...there are other ways...Every life is put here for a purpose and I hope that purpose will serve the good of humanity!

Chris Rock said it best - "The money's not in the cure; the money's in the medicine."

CHRIS There is no cure for Tay Sachs which disproportioniately affects Jews, sickle cell anemica which disproportionately affects those of West African descent & diabetes which disproportionately affects Latinos. Finding a cure for auto immune or other diseases is not always a simple matter of discrimination. On account of Human Immunodeficiency Virus's (HIV) incredible ability to mutate, there are many sympathetic scientists & physicians who believe that "cure" for Anti-Immune Deficieny Syndrome (AIDS) will never be found. The best we may be able to do is to create medications which will diminish effects of secondary infections and increase longevity of those infected with the disease. As you may note, medications for HIV/AIDS have been quite profitable for pharmaceutical companies much as have been those fo many other diseases such as bipolar depression. But that has never stopped scientists from investigating cures and pharmaceutical companies being otherwise profitable.

I hope this comment was irony or else you'd think a person with a computer knew more about HIV than that it's a gay decease.... the first people that ever got HIV was straight, and the fastest growing group in the states to get HIV now are sadly afro american women. And all over the world, gay men are not the big spreaders, it's straight men who rape or by sex and spread it around. The best way to prevent HIV is actually information, honesty and protection, but I guess that's to fucking hard fore douchebags to do... And to hard for religious baby breeders to accept..

So now dead babies can save gay men? The right wingers are going to loooove this.

We may see other countries using stem-cell transplants to cure HIV in the near future (I say "cure" because it's been 2 years and no one can prove this man HASN'T been cured...only theorize that he "might" not be). But here in the USA the FDA will block it with every power they have... in the meantime wholeheartedly approving very toxic HIV drugs for patients to gobble down like candy. Why? Because stem cell treatments would deny the BIG PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES their dollars. This is a shame and a criminal outrage. (And to qualify my outrage, I was diagnosed HIV+ in 1996).

Thanks for the link Edward. The full article in the medical journal was fascinating reading, even having only limited understanding of the highly technical stuff, and is somewhat promising, but not wildly so. It notes for example, that other attempts to do the same thing were not successful. Also, the allele only blocks CD4 cell entry for HIV-1, other types of HIV are not blocked, and further, while people who have this genetic make-up naturally are "highly resistant" to HIV-1, most seem not to be completely resistant because of the alternate co-receptor that Edward mentioned. Hence, the reason why the treatment apparently conferred complete resistance in this one very lucky aids patient is a subject of investigation, but as I gather, is not fully understood. The report estimates that about 1% of the population may have the (homozygous pairing of the) HIV-resistant allele, comprising a pool of potential donors if future research breakthroughs do improve the rate of treatment success.

There was an article in the NYTimes titled "In New Way to Edit DNA, Hope for Treating Desease" dated 12-29-09 by Nicholas Wade about the same subject, and the possibility of using gene therapy for treating the HIV.

Did anyone else notice the CNN article was from a year ago? It took me forever to find the paper. (Link: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/360/7/692) It's important to note that this was not even close to a clinical trial, and using the methods in the article, hardly scalable. It was a proof-of-concept medical experiment. The man in the article was infected with HIV-1 for a decade, then got leukemia. He needed a bone marrow transplant, so the doctors decided to see what would happen if they gave him bone marrow from a donor who was homozygous for CCR5 delta32--that is, bone marrow from a person immune to most strains of HIV. So they gave him the transplant, took him of his antiretrovirals and--hey presto!--there was still no virus in his blood. Pretty cool stuff, but we're still talking about a single lucky guy here.

There are alternate pathways for the HIV virus to enter the cell like CXCR4, another coreceptor. I imagine that if this treatment takes off, it will only be available to those who are CCR5 tropic, which is not necessarily the majority of the infected population.