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."

Comments

Alt Therapies

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:Uh This is a Surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

-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.

Re:Uh This is a Surprise?

[thms]

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.

Re:How about a bone marrow transplant?

[v1]

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.