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HIV Immunity Gene Found In Rhesus Monkeys
Stile 65 writes "According to the BBC, the National Institute for Medical Research has isolated a gene in rhesus monkeys that makes them immune to HIV. Amazingly, 'only a single change to the human [version of the] gene is needed to enable it to block HIV infection.' It's a very different approach to treating HIV infection from the potential vaccine developed in Brazil and described earlier on Slashdot."
And please let it work on humans. Also, it'd be nice if it didn't have unforeseen longterm effects.
Ever since I read about the potential of gene therapy I've held my breath for a successful application. All experimental treatments that involve gene therapy on humans have failed. A major blow came in January 2003, when the FDA placed a temporary halt on all gene therapy trials using retroviral vectors in blood stem cells. Kids getting leukemia from an experimental treatment, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for gene therapy (even if they were french). Can these difficulties be overcome? Could this finally be the calling for gene therapy in adults? Or will gene therapy just become a replacement for genetic screening at the embrotic level (ala Frank Herbert's, The Eyes of Heisenberg).
How we know is more important than what we know.
... but it sounds from the article like the actual practicality of making that change is some way off. I quote:
it is important to stress that any therapeutic benefits that may arise from this research are unlikely to be felt for many years.
"This type of gene therapy would involve removing white blood cells from patients, cloning them, and altering their genetic make-up before reintroducing them to the patient on an individual-by-individual basis.
"Although it is theoretically possible, this approach is unlikely to be practical or cost-effective with currently available technologies."
It sounds to me like this would be a rather arduous process to go through, and given the scale of the epedemic that means, effectively, no major impact. The only effective solution is likely to be a cheap, easily admistered, relatively safe vaccine.
What would have an impact would be for religious leaders worldwide to withdraw their objections to birth control and actually promote condom use. Likewise better funding for medical facilities in overstressed third-world location would prevent infection via needle re-use, as would an educated approach to drug addiction, rather than simply pushing the issue underground.
there, three easy steps to minimise the spread, while the clever guys work on an actual therapy.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
It seems like an awful amount of work to do on a full grown human...
University of Washington
Student
Not to suggest that we shouldn't cure AIDS, but eliminating HIV as a threat might have some unintended consequences. Would infection rates for other STDs jump as people stopped worrying about condoms? I expect that any such cure will need to be accompanied by a major STD education campaign.
who would have thought that all this time, people could have been eating rhesus phesus as a cure?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I wonder if these gene prevents the spread of AIDS from monkeys to humans.
I mean, uh, this would be good if it works in humans. Yeah.
Why are you staring?
and soon we will all have the genetics that make us immune to all diseases known to man. Then, when a disease unknown to man arrives it can get us all at once, for genetic variation would be engineered out of us. BAD IDEA. Get us a vaccination, not gene modification.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
A virus agains a virus?
The only way i see it done with current statistics, it's neither simple nor cheap.
You'll need a bone marrow sample. Infect it with a retrovirus and then replacing all the previous bone marrow with the corrected one.
You can't take entire third world populations throught the bubble boy approach...
The other way around is to find what is the purpose of that gene in the machinery of the cell and with that find another way to stomp the virus out of the T-cells.
--- The Farmaceutical Industry will still cry all the way to the bank.
i havent read the article, but at first glance i think "aren't monkeys immune to hiv anyways." before flaming, realize that HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus
who would have thought that all this time, people could have been eating rhesus phesus
I don't eat monkey shit, no matter how much I get thrown at me. I've been told it's nothing to phone home about.
The FDA index of treatments no longer mentions birth control or contraception.
FDA index
The same way we got a treatment for not being able to get an erection: make sure it affects a lot of rich, white, American men. We'll have a cure in no time!
I joke, but many a true hath been spoke in jest.
.\.\att Clare
The fine print is that you risk becoming a 5-monkey-assed human when you undergo this therapy.
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
hey! this isn't offtopic! who modded it offtopic? the dude that made the comment above mine was talking about consequences of a cure. a cure is what the article is about. what i said may be contraversial to some, but it is NOT offtopic.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
...is Rhesus peices.
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I think theres a problem in that a lot of current thought is based on Burnette and White's view of the Evolution of Infectious diseases (from the 70s) which states that disease epidemics come when a pathogen moves from a population where it is relativly benign to one which is unprotected, becomes endemic in the new population, and evolves towards benign coexistance with their new host over time. The CDC has even fudged their data (the def. of AIDS) to mimic the spike and decline expected of an epidemic that's become endemic.
The problem is that Burnette and White's views are based on airborne diseases which are frequently transmitted one strain at a time and require the host to be fit enough to walk around in order to pass on the disease, thus selecting against very deadly diseases in most circumstances.
Ewald's theories on the Evolution of Infectious disease differentiates between airborne and bloodborne diseases and more accuratly describes epidemics. Bloodborne diseases increase in virulence when passed rapidly from host to host. If you take a benign pathogen, inject it into a rabbit, remove some blood from the infected rabbit and inject it into a second rabbit... and repeat this for 10 rabbits, allowing time for the virus to propigate in each host but not for the host to become immune, then the pathogen will rapidly evolve to become extremly virulent.
Many sexually transmitted epidemics can be traced to a change in social organization. Syphyllis followed the rise of cities in Europe, for example. Before that, the Palladium pathogen was a relativly benign skin infection.
Also, (on a related note), keep in mind that any statistics for Africa are based entirely on symptoms. They don't do tests for viruses or antibodies, since they don't have the cash. And immune deficiency can be caused by things other than HIV. I'm sure the incidence of AIDS in Africa is high, but you have to be careful when making conclusions based on very tenuous statistics gathered in third world countries.
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Why can't reporters critically examine scientific theories the same way that they're expected to investigate other things. The folks who wrote this report didn't even know that AIDS was an acronym, and wrote it Aids.
Gah
Get a reporter with a fvcking science degree!
I expect more of the BBC.
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All experimental treatments that involve gene therapy on humans have failed
Sadly true for any useful treatment of disease so far.
Really the current news is about a scientific discovery, not about gene-therapy at all. But so many people seem to need to say the words 'gene therapy', just to make the thing look newsworthy.
It seems to be a discovery about comparative or evolutionary biology of the immune system. How these gene differences arose and how they were perpetuated are interesting questions in themselves. For example, which (if either) is the ancestral version of the gene? Did humans lose it or did the other primates gain it? Do the monkeys represent survivors of an originally more genetically diverse population, after continuing exposure to an environment rich in HIV-like viruses?
I'd suspect that if this discovery can provide any avenue towards improved human HIV therapy at all, then it may be more likely to happen by a different route than by gene-therapy. It may be that the current discovery leads to further discoveries about differences in the binding of smaller molecules by the proteins that are specified by the newly identified gene-variants. That in turn my lead to development of inhibitory pharmaceuticals intended to block the infective process. But on any scenario it will be a long haul.
-wb-
a working delivery method convenient enough to be
applied to a large population. Of course only if
it is safe and has no detrimental effects on the
patients and their offspring.
Nice would be a kind of non selfreproducing
retro-virus which could (only) infect fertilized
human egg cells and flick (only) that gene-switch.
All you would need then to apply the gene-therapy
will be a load of viri and a syringe.
The human which will then be born will have a
(artificial) inherent immunity to aids.
ps. This is only wishful thinking. I see this
nowhere near ready for the next decade. The
ethical (by any definition) debate will also be
extremely ugly...
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Maybe we infuse the hiv-fighting gene into or own gene pool by having sexual relations with the monkeys, that ought to prevent HIV.
Oh, wait...
68.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
The folks who wrote this report didn't even know that AIDS was an acronym, and wrote it Aids.
The folks who wrote this report are British and their convention is to capitalize only the first letter of acronyms. They think your all-caps AIDS looks like shouting. Open your mind to the customs of others before ranting.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
I seem to remember that another type of primate (Baboons I think) was also found immune to HIV, though they weren't sure why. It was either a gene they had that prevented it, or a lack of something else that it needed to propogate.
While I seem to remember that about 1% of people of European descent are immune, something that has to do with their ancestors surviving the plague due to a genetic "defect", and the same "defect" is protecting them from HIV.
It's even mentionned in this article
i dont want to turn into George W. and his cabinent!!!
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
While this may be true in a general sense when trying to apply these models to HIV, i might point out that Influenza and TB are both airborne, and both very large health threats. Also Ebola Reston was airborne. Latency is the key....
Also, (on a related note), keep in mind that any statistics for Africa are based entirely on symptoms. They don't do tests for viruses or antibodies, since they don't have the cash. And immune deficiency can be caused by things other than HIV. I'm sure the incidence of AIDS in Africa is high, but you have to be careful when making conclusions based on very tenuous statistics gathered in third world countries.
Not necessarily, most African HIV estimates are based upon antenatal patient sampling, which is not symptom based - a symptom based diagnosis is inappropriate for estimating prevalence of a disease with such a long latency, also the selection bias is probably stronger than that of antenatal sampling.
Having spent time in South African government hospitals i can say that they certainly did do HIV tests on patients (it was actually unusual for people to be in the hospital without HIV), and unlike the US they just ran the tests without the patients even knowing. Since HIV/AIDS is such a stigma there the doctors and medical personel would call it "RVD" (Retroviral Disease) or "immunodefficiency" or other such code-words. Must've been a cultural or taboo type thing, but none of the patients even knew they had AIDS even when it was painfully obvious they did (like they had invasive KS leasions invading the lungs through the chest wall, or intractable candidiasis of the scalp or whathaveyou)...
Reminds me of the way that all the girls got put on birth control (depo medrol generally) immediately after their first period, but no one ever talked to them about HIV.
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Nevermind. Got the scotch reference.
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