Cure For HIV?

This article hints at a possible cure for HIV. It is interesting to note that the patient was originally being treated for leukaemia. One way of doing this is to kill the patient’s bone marrow. Often, the cells responsible for leukaemia arise in the bone marrow, so targeting that can resolve the cancer. The aberrant cells are often sensitive to the same treatments that kill the bone marrow. The problem is that all our blood cells (red and white) ultimately arise in the bone marrow from stem cells, so, the patient will die if they are not given a transplant of healthy cells. The interesting thing about this story is that the HIV positive patient was given a transplant of bone marrow from a donor with a mutation in the chemokine receptor CCR5. HIV needs two proteins to get into and infect cells. One is CD4 which is found (but not exclusivley) on “helper” T lymphocytes - this is one of the reasons the virus causes immuno-deficiency. The other protein is CCR5. This means that the virus has a hard time infecting the donors’ lymphocytes. As a result of this, the recipient has no detectable HIV a full 20 months after treatment. Caution should be taken however, as certain cells in the brain also express CD4, and are known to act as a viral reservoir – otherwise a normal bone marrow transplant – or even “cleaning up” the patients own bone marrow would be a possible cure .

This is one reason why stem cell research is important. The possibility exists that the patients own stem cells could be modified to not express mutant CCR5 – or even no CCR5. Technologies already exist to put genes into other animals. We can even insert mutants or knock out the gene entirely. We can even choose what tissues to modify, and when to modify them. Basically, if the religious don’t like that, they can go buy a dildo. I’ll stick with trying to save people.