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Doctors Will Test Gene Editing On HIV Patients
Soychemist writes "Some people have a mutation that makes them highly resistant to HIV, and scientists think that they can give that immunity to anyone with a new type of gene therapy. The first human trials will start at the University of Pennsylvania this week. Researchers will draw blood from people with drug-resistant HIV, clip the CCR5 gene out of their T-cells with a nuclease enzyme, grow the modified cells in a dish, and then return 10 billion of them to the patient's bloodstream. Those cells will be immune to the virus, and they will keep the patient's T-cell count up even if the rest are destroyed. 'We will see if it is safe and if those cells inhibit HIV replication in vivo,' said the lead researcher. 'We know they do in the test tube.'"
Hopefully the researchers are successful in their endeavours but you've got to wonder about the costs associated with such a procedure. With something like a 33 million estimated people infected with HIV world-wide I wonder what percentage would actually be able to afford treatment :/
With modern antiretroviral drugs HIV positive patients can live for decades
Have you looked at federal expenditures on medical care lately? Let's face it, with skyrocketing costs of all of these medical treatments, we're going to need to rethink who lives and who dies, particularly when it comes to preventable diseases that are hideously expensive to treat.
HIV, lung cancer, some forms of heart disease, ultimately, people will just have to be made comfortable unless they plan on paying for their medical care themselves. It would be one thing if people got insurance for HIV and lung cancer through private insurers who accepted the risks, but, once all taxpayers have to accept that risk, well, its an entirely different contract.
In that sense, this new genetic treatment is the shape of things to come, where the government experiments on treating on some people with some new drug, because, they aren't going to get anything else.
This is my sig.
I wouldn't put any money on that scenario.
HIV resistant people are carriers of the virus yet it's not a terminal disease for them. As such, it's a win-win situation for both man and virus. If the virus mutates to a more agressive variant that circumvents the resistance and kills the patient then that strain of HIV is dead and gone(maybe stored in a fridge somewhere).
Is it likely such a mutation would happen in all resistant carriers? No way. And considering that todays model of HIV is actually less agressive than the original i'd say that if anything the virus will mutate to a more tame variant. After all from an evolutionary standpoint the fittest virus does no direct noticeable harm to it's host.