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Researchers Discover Gene That Blocks HIV
stemceller writes to tell us that a team of researchers at the University of Alberta claims to have discovered a gene capable of blocking HIV thereby preventing the onset of full blown AIDS. "Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, says his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus. 'When we put this gene in cells, it prevents the assembly of the HIV virus," said Barr, a postdoctoral fellow. "This means the virus cannot get out of the cells to infect other cells, thereby blocking the spread of the virus.'"
Does anyone know if gene therapy has progressed far enough to actually apply this to cell DNA? Is this actually a real cure for AIDS?
Assuming that this is a real cure for AIDS, will it be patented away and made prohibitively expensive, or will it be made available at low cost to those who need it?
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There are a lot of things that block HIV in cell culture.
Yet after literally hundreds of millions in financing, there isn't yet any real curative treatment. Why? Because HIV is a retrovirus with one of the worst polymerases known. It's just so bad at copying itself, that any treatment applied in-vivo acts only as a selective pressure.
Same is the case for HIV vaccines - even though there ARE conserved regions of the virus, they aren't very good targets, and the ones that are good targets are too antigenically fluid to be targeted.
In the end, my opinion as a virologist is that stopping the spread of HIV, and continuing to develop a larger palette of inhibitors are the proper solutions to the HIV problem. If we treat the people who have been infected, and don't infect any more... HIV will not be a problem after 2 generations.
People who survived the Plague in Europe either did not encounter it or almost universally had a genetic anomaly commonly referred to as the delta-32 marker. Their ancestors survive other diseases because of this causing what amounts to an odd protein binding issue on the cellular level. Those people are also naturally immune to HIV.
Read more:
wikipedia
pbs
No radicals screaming "If we vaccinate everyone now, everyone will feel free to go and have promiscuous sex!"? I'm disappointed.
'cause I hadn't watched it in a long time, but Ian says something interesting: Life will always find a way. Meaning, there will always be a tension between our genes trying to evolve out of disease, and the disease out-evolving our adaptations by employing its own. I hate to sound cynical, but even if this were a cure, HIV will find another way or be supplanted by another disease more powerful.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
As the article says, the researchers are going to find out why this gene isn't already stopping HIV infection. I.e. back to square one. This is not a cure, it's an interesting in vitro study. HIV is hard to fix because it evolves so quickly in an individual, in response to the immune system and anti-retrovirals. It appears already to have evolved around this gene's activity in vivo. Not sure why this is a headline.
Obviously our bodies makes TRIM22 to fight against retroviruses already, and it's not good enough. I know that interferon, which activates TRIM22, was an early drug in the fight against HIV.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WXR-4KCGHS0-3&_user=18704&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000002018&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=18704&md5=f922f45405809276e69864f01d98ef4c
According to this study, TRIM22 is one of most ineffectual TRIM proteins.
Can I just remind you all of the hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries over the last 10 years who have DIED from CURED DISEASES. Sure, a vaccine sounds great, but I wont be convinced untill I see people in Africa actually routinely get access to these medical facilities and not just from small time (relative) aid charities. We need a bigger change than just finding cures to more diseases.
And it always mutates.
Veramocor
You're using her as bait, Master!
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head. But consider this - your argument essentially boils down to saying that healthcare is a human right. And for those who are about to spew bile at me for saying that, please read the rest of the post.
Let's compare healthcare to food, for instance. In the civilized world, it's a nearly universal agreement, that people should have enough food to survive. Hence, the different forms of welfare programs, food stamps, etc... We provide people who are poor, with enough money or money equivalents, to obtain sufficient sustenance. We don't, however, provide them with 5-course chef-prepared meals every night.
The problem is, however, that people who flame the government and "corporations" for not providing medication for everyone, are essentially suggesting that we provide full healthcare for everyone... which equates to giving out filet mignon welfare, given the costs of many cutting edge drugs and treatments. Now I don't have a problem with the concept of this "filet mignon welfare"... except that I cannot personally afford it... and neither can you.
So as a society, we will at some point have to face the realization that we cannot provide the highest quality healthcare to every member of our society, no matter how hard we try. I wish I had the solution to this problem, but I do not. If I come up with one, I promise to share it with the world, as there is nothing more I'd like to see, than a world where the only diseases people die of, are ones for which cures and treatments haven't been discovered yet. But that's not a world of today, nor do I envision such a world in the near future.
I'm always suspicious whenever I see ostensibly "high-impact" summaries that link to press releases of work that is either unpublished or published in low impact journals. In this case, I haven't looked up the impact factor of the journal PLoS pathogens (article), but I do biophysics research on HIV and I've never heard of this journal. As a useful general rule, science articles shouldn't appear on here (and waste everyone's time) unless they've been submitted through a peer-reviewed journal (not the case here), and I think they should hit high-impact journals like Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, ...
But it's not a treatment! It's just a couple of pieces of data.
It's a in-vitro study of one tiny aspect of one pathway that MAY be helpful in TRYING to create a treatment.
If a cure is a 20-layer cake, these people have created a recipe for the syrup for the cream, for one of the layers. According to you, that negates the need to buy ingredients, find out the recipes for the other layers, hire the chef, or actually make the cake!
1. CCR5 delta 32 is not super common, with a gene frequency of about .1 across Europe as a whole and maxing at about .23 in Ashkenaz jews. Evidence indicates that the black plague ceased to be common because of human resistance to it; which means that a gene frequency of .1 would not protect a whole population, which means it can't be the sole cause of surviving black plague.
.1 x .1 = .01 , so about 1% of European are immune to HIV as a result of CCR5 delta 32. In the context of 'today', this is almost completely insignificant.
2. You need two copies of CCR5 delta 32 for it to truly protect someone,
3. There is evidencethat bubonic plague could not produce the selective pressure necessary to spread CCR5 delta 32 widely, and smallpox is implicated instead.
The good part is that HIV attacks the white blood cells, i.e.: cells that aren't fixed in an organ, but that freely mobile in the blood stream and are produced by the bone marrow (which can also be injected freely in the blood stream and will home on its own to the bones).
So one possibility would be to :
- get some progenitor cells from the marrow
- do the recombination under laboratory controlled conditions using whatever methodology seems to be the best (not forced to use viruses that can still replicate other methods could be acceptable)
- select those progenitor cells where the recombination happened in the most optimal way (the new gene did got indeed inserted, and got inserted at a correct place where it won't cause cancer or otherwise disturb the function of gene that were present before the recombination)
- inject those modified cells into the patient bloodstream and let them go back to the bone marrow
- those celles produce a new generation of HIV-resistant lymphocytes.
As we are not forced to use virus inside a patient but can do the transformation under controlled conditions, and as we have a lot more knowledge about human genome, we might manage to diminish the risk of the transposons continuing to jump around and damage important genes (compared for example to what was found with Monsanto's GM corn).
Risks of rejection may be lowered compared to what happens with Cystic-fibrosis gene therapy, because :
- no virus inside the patient body and less foreign material : less likely to trigger a immune response.
- cells are only modified using the new gene, no other virus-cycle replicating proteins : less likely to be recognized as 'foreign'
- patient with an active AIDS are immuno-compromised anyway so the risk of immunological reject are lowered anyway.
Also, unlike other gene therapies, the effect of that one are very likely to be permanent because we have access to the progenitor cells that produce the lymphocytes. Whereas with CF gene therapy, the virus is inhaled and affects cells on the surface of the respiratory tract : mostly differentiated cells that won't divide anymore, once they are dead a new exposition to the virus is necessary to produce a new crop of modified cells, hence the risk of rejection increase with each exposition. In CF, the progenitor cells aren't easily available.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Seriously, be a prude all you want but don't spread FUD. The odds are 1 in 50 million if you're in a low risk group. This statistic has probably dropped as HIV spread, though not by much. And there's a good reason why:
If you know your partner has HIV, the odds of getting HIV with a condom is 1 in 5000 sexual acts.
These are real statistics from the JAMA and widely quoted by the CDC which fields thousands of calls about OMG A CONDOM BROKE WITH MY ONE NIGHT STAND. ODDS: ~1 in 1000 for high risk groups.
And for the record: 1 time unprotected sex with an HIV+ partner is 1 in 500 odds.
Of course, more accurate risk analysis would point out that women and receptors of anal sex are more likely to contract HIV.
And finally, with consistent condom use there is a 2 percent chance of a couple getting pregnant in a year's time.
missing tag. AIDS is a master of the virus's trick of the trade, rapid mutation. To block something thoroughly and reliably requires blocking a key step in a way that is not trivial to circumvent, because mutation adapts to very simple blocks very rapidly.
I don't see anything here that even remotely sounds like this was a well-thought-out fix. These sorts of discoveries are usually by chance, try this, try that, and observe results. If it only takes one very minor change in the viruse's DNA (RNA?) to get around this, it won't take any time to work it out.
The more well-thought-out methods are more likely to succeed or at least to hold up longer. Now while Jurassic Park did find a way around it, the concept of stopping reproduction by making the entire population female, in theory is a very well thought out measure and is not trivial to bypass. You'd put a lot more stock in that than if they had say, injected the dinos with something that sterilized them. This looks more like a random attack with results that are not even remotely understood.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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5) Don't ever get in an accident and need a blood transfusion, because the blood might be infected- especially in poorer nations.
6) Don't have a mother who had HIV while carrying you. That's a bad choice to make- don't inflict this kind of injury on yourself.
7) Don't be a woman and get raped by a man who has HIV. That's a bad choice to make- don't inflict this kind of injury on yourself.