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AIDS Virus Can Hide In Bone Marrow
suraj.sun writes "The virus that causes AIDS can hide in the bone marrow, avoiding drugs and later awakening to cause illness, according to new research that could point the way toward better treatments for the disease. Dr. Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan and her colleagues report in this week's edition of the journal Nature Medicine that the HIV virus can infect long-lived bone marrow cells that eventually convert into blood cells. The virus is dormant in the bone marrow cells, she said, but when those progenitor cells develop into blood cells, it can be reactivated and cause renewed infection. The virus kills the new blood cells and then moves on to infect other cells, said. In recent years, drugs have reduced AIDS deaths sharply, but patients need to keep taking the medicines for life or the infection comes back, Dr. Collins said."
IIRC, they did a bone marrow transplant between someone with AIDS/HIV and another person who had a natural immunity to the disease.
The HIV positive patient was 'cured'
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1858843,00.html
Is this a viable cure for HIV? Not by a long shot. Even [Berlin-based hematologist Gero] Huetter says bone-marrow transplants, which kill about a third of patients, are so dangerous that "they can't be justified ethically" in anything other than desperate situations like late-stage leukemia.
...
But there might be a glimmer of hope in the case. If the transplant does prove to have been a success and can be replicated, researchers say gene therapists might one day be able to re-engineer a patient's cells to change their bone marrow the same way a transplant does, except without the dangers.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You wouldn't remove it. You'd replace it with a nonmalevolent retrovirus.
$genome = str_replace($retroVirus, $superPower, $genome);
Just make sure you get the values in your variables correct, and that your body is upgraded to PHP v4.1 or later
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
-10 internet points. It becomes part of the dna for a few select cell types, not EVERY cell type, and certainly you cannot spread this 'bad' DNA to offspring by means of DNA in eggs/sperm. you are implying that a virus competely changes your entire genetic make up. and this is simply not the case. it changes cellular dna to instructs those infected cells to mass produce new hiv. You wont be growing wings anytime soon.
HIV is a retrovirus. It literally becomes a part of your DNA. The only way to truly cure HIV is to remove the HIV DNA from your genome, good luck with that.
Sarcasm isn't warranted. Remember that each cell carries -it's own copy- of the genome. HIV does not infect every cell in your body. Kill off the infected cells and you've gotten rid of all the HIV DNA. Kill off the mature immune system cells and you'll still have this reservoir of stem cells which apperantly produce more virus. Kill off the fraction of bone marrow cells (ideally without killing the patient) and you'll have gotten rid of the HIV DNA.
Your brain cells, for example, don't appear to be infected and their copies of the genome will not have any HIV DNA in them. So it's not nearly as impossible as you've suggested.
you are implying that a virus competely changes your entire genetic make up. and this is simply not the case. it changes cellular dna to instructs those infected cells to mass produce new hiv. You wont be growing wings anytime soon.
Transposons would like to disagree! These make up upto 50% of the human genome (only 2% are actual Genes)! They are essentially viruses trapped in your cell, they can still duplicate, but they lost their ability to leave the cell. Selfish Genes essentially. Luckily most of them are inactive by now.
It is believed that the us Eutheria, i.e. mammals with a placenta, gained the ability to have one common circulatory system for two different organisms by using viral DNA to keep the immune system from going nuts about this.
Gosh, doesn't the submitter realize that Slashdotters are computer geeks and not biology geeks? Use analogies we can understand, like comparing this "hiding" virus to a rootkit or something.
So the only logical conclusion is that likely all cells are infected, but do not commonly produce viruses.
The only logical conclusion is the one that requires the biggest leap? Okay...
There are a number of possible conclusions, but I'd say the most logical one is the one that requires the fewest leaps and best fits the evidence.
The second part of the body after the blood that we find is infected is the bone marrow, which is responsible for producing blood, and is vastly more difficult to inspect that parts of the body that have so far shown no infection, like the skin. A logical conclusion would therefore be that HIV infects the blood and bone marrow which produces blood, and not other parts of the body which have not shown any infection despite being easier to investigate.
Another logical conclusion would be that since the infected bone marrow cells are dormant and inactive until they become blood cells, and only bone marrow cells become blood cells, that fighting the infection in the marrow (e.g. via a transplant though that's a big hammer) would be sufficient and any "infection" in the rest of the body would be irrelevant. Oh and hey there's some evidence that this actually works too.
You could of course be right and the entire body has its DNA re-written and that every cell in the body could potentially start creating new viruses. That's certainly not the only logical conclusion, nor do I think it's the most logical (since observation seems to go against it), but it's possible.
But ultimately the most logical conclusion that you or I can reach is that we should wait for the fine folks doing the research to continue to do their good work rather than assuming we've already got it all figured out. :P
The enemies of Democracy are
Also known as the human immunodeficiency virus virus.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think it's interesting that the cells themselves can hide in the progenitor cell
We're discussing the aids virus, not a cell infected with it. virus != cell.
The issue here is that some (all?) bone marrow stem cells don't progress with the reproduction of the virus while it's a stem cell. Once the stem cell is infected, the virus sits there, dormant, because the cell is not hospitable for it to reproduce in. Then when the stem cell differentiates into a red blood cell, the virus is able to resume its mission, and kicks out a few thousand new virons which re-initiate infection. This someone that was thought to be "cured" becomes reinfected.
Nerve cells have also been known to serve as time capsules for a variety of viruses, though I don't believe they've figured out what triggers reactivation in those cases. These sleepers are really challenging for the immune system to deal with, because from the outside of the cell where the white blood cells etc are milling around, the infected cell looks and behaves normally. It's only detected as a problem after it's fired up the bug factory inside, and by that time it may be too late. Unless the cell behaves abnormally, there's just no way for the immune system to identify the cell as needing to be destroyed. And from there the only thing that can kill it is itself. But again the apoptosis process is usually triggered by abnormalities within the cell - if the virus is dormant there's nothing to trigger that either. The cell doesn't know it's a carrier, nor does the immune system.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Anyway, back on the point: I don't think they'd transplant any tissue from an HIV carrier to a healthy person even without the current finding.
Wha?
The OP was talking about killing off the bone marrow in the *infected* patient and then performing a marrow transplant (a common treatment for lymphomas). No idea how you interpreted it as the reverse, what good would that do??
yeah, but at least it's not sarcoidosis.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I doubt the GP would deny your point. You're arguing two different things. We've incorporated a ridiculous amount of viral material over the course of human (or any) evolution. That said, when you get infected by HIV or any other retrovirus, it's not like every single cell in your body all gets brand new retroviral goodness injected into the nucleus. All that viral material in our DNA is from viruses infecting gametes that managed to go on and produce a viable reproducing human being (which now has the viral goodness in EVERY cell because the gametes had it too). Over and over and over again over a shit load of generations. Two related... but also completely different things.
What do you want, a decree from God or something? We have some pretty large mountains of scientific evidence.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
While the HIV's preferred target cells are T-cells, macrophages (which tend to be long-lived cells) and microglia (macrophage-like cells that live in the brain) also take up the M-tropic strains of the virus. As these cell types derive ultimately from hematopoietic stem cells, it is not a great surprise to read about this. Sounds like the so-called journalist from AP news was having a slow day.
As for transplants being the great new cure-all for HIV infection: no. Transplantation substitutes one batch of problems for another batch of medical issues. A good HLA match is still required, and finding someone with the right CCR5 or CXCR5 mutation would make the situation doubly difficult. Then, because the engrafted immune system will recognize the host's antigens as foreign (even with HLA typing), the recipient would still require immunosuppression, putting them at risk for the kinds of infections and tumours that HIV patients tend to get. Not to mention the costs of actually doing and maintaining a transplant patient. Can't do that for millions of people, it's hugely expensive.
What this study probably implies is that autologous stem-cell transplantation (capturing the patient's own stem cells, eradicating their immune system, and putting back the stem cells to reconstitute the patient's immune system -- a treatment sometimes used in some lymphomas) would not be feasible as a last-ditch treatment for HIV/AIDS. It wouldn't solve the problem of HIV hiding in 'privileged' sites such as the brain (microglia) anyways, and being a source for viral replication/release even when virions are banished from the blood.
HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) causes AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), which makes HIV the AIDS virus. That is how the English language works. Also, science. It is the same science that tells us that some forms of HPV can cause warts and/or cancer. It's sciency science. This sort of science is not popular with AIDS denialists, but that does not change the fact that it is real and actual science brought to you by the kinds of people who make organ transplants possible, not the kind of AIDS denialists who publish stories in Harper's. I only mention this because your comment seems sort of dismissive and misguidedly pedantic, and I want to cover some bases before other people get going.
Not that there even is an aids virus. I thought it was HIV
AIDS was originally the description of the condition/symptoms of the disease that was later identified as HIV. The terms are now used somewhat interchangeably. (tho admittedly, this is probably poor usage, but at some point you just have to accept it)
Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome. Basically, something you caught from someone else crippled your immune system. Took them awhile to figure out what it was and actually isolate and classify it. That something was HIV.
The term "AIDS" got its foothold during the time period between when we recognized the disease and figured out what was causing it. You still call a cold a "cold", even though we now know that being exposed to cold damp weather for extended periods isn't actually what is the root cause of your getting sick.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
We use chemicals, not radiation. The disease is called leukemia; it is cancer of the immune system.
AIDS has been cured this way. The patient already had leukemia. They got the AIDS cure thrown in for free. :-)
They never made any sequels to Highlander.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.