Integrated HIV Successfully Cut Out of Human Genome

Chris writes "German scientists have succeeded in snipping HIV out of human cells after it has integrated itself into a patient's DNA. The procedure is a breakthrough in bio-technology and fuels hope of a cure for AIDS. The group is only cautiously optimistic, though, as treating a full-on infection would be substantially different than succeeding in a controlled lab environment. 'Researchers ... began with the bacterial enzyme Cre recombinase, which exchanges any two pieces of DNA flanked on either end by a certain pattern of nucleotides (DNA subunits) known as loxP. HIV does not naturally contain loxP sites, so the team created a hybrid of the two DNA molecules, which they used to select a series of mutated Cre enzymes that were increasingly able to recognize the combined DNA. The final enzyme, Tre, removed all traces of HIV from cultured human cervical cells after about three months, the researchers report online today in Science.'"

Comments

Slight Clarification

[eldavojohn]

I read about this in PhysOrg yesterday and they speak more about something the last paragraph of Scientific American only mentions. The fact that they wouldn't use this enzyme to remove HIV infections but instead to figure out which cells have been infected. The biggest problem in treating HIV is that it can go dormant and undetected for so long during which the host can infect others. It sounds horrible, but even being able to destroy all the cells infected with the virus is worth something though it may often prove fatal to the host. I don't think this is a 'cure' or 'vaccine' merely something that makes HIV treatments much much more effective.

Re:In the shower....

[The-Ixian]

Do you, by any chance, wake up to public radio or similar? I find that sometimes the first 10 minutes or so of what is said on the radio, before I become fully cognizant, gets absorbed into my subconscious so that I think it is weird when I hear the same bit of news later in the day.