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.
... 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
And please let it work on humans. Also, it'd be nice if it didn't have unforeseen longterm effects.
Recipients of the vaccine may develop the following side effects:
* An intense desire for bananas.
* Repeated urges to hurl their own feces at fellow primates (even when its NOT an election year).
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."
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.
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
...is Rhesus peices.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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-