Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
It seems like an awful amount of work to do on a full grown human...
University of Washington
Student
aids is so slow that other std's have plenty of time to transfer with it too.
but most areas needing condoms for aids also need them for overpopulation anyhow...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
i understand what you mean but think about what you just said, because many of those unintended consequences will be rightwing religious groups (many of whom now have a lot of money and a loud voice in the media) telling us about how "science is removing god's will of punishing people who sin against him"...
think i'm kidding? a quick google and take a look here and more here... scary huh?
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
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-