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Australian Scientists Discover Potential Aids Cure
smi.james.th writes "Several sites report that Australian researcher David Harrich and his team have potentially discovered a way to stop HIV becoming AIDS and ultimately cure the disease. From the article: 'What we've actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we've changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly.' This could potentially hail one of modern medicine's greatest victories."
A big contributing factor toward why Australia's medical research is so strong at an international scale is the fact it's often academic and/or ultimately government funded.
The Australian government doesn't care about big pharma (which doesn't have an especially large presence in AU, relatively speaking) making profits, it cares about better health care for it's people, so they live longer, work longer, and pay more taxes.
This in no way arms the body with immune cells that are resistant to infection. This is a virostatic agent, that will stop the virus from replicating inside immune cells. But it does not block free virus from infecting new cells.
Gene therapy, in short. They would infect you with a virus (probably a retrovirus, ironically enough) that carries a mutant copy of the HIV-1 Tat gene. Normal Tat is a gene that drastically increases HIV production. HIV hijacks the machinery of human T-cells to make copies of its own genes. The protein that Tat codes for has a nasty trick- it binds to transcription factors in your cells and and increases their output- more HIV production, which includes more Tat production, which causes more HIV production, and the disease explosively progresses. It is thought that reaching a critical mass of Tat is a key element in the transition from HIV infection to AIDS. But if you had a mutant Tat that counteracted this activity, HIV production would only occur at a baseline rate- you'd never get that Tat-HIV-Tat positive feedback.
Here's the article abstract which has some of the technical details. MLV is the murine (mouse) leukemia virus.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
A big contributing factor toward why Australia's medical research is so strong at an international scale is the fact it's often academic and/or ultimately government funded.
The Australian government doesn't care about big pharma (which doesn't have an especially large presence in AU, relatively speaking) making profits, it cares about better health care for it's people, so they live longer, work longer, and pay more taxes.
Big Pharma are around, I used to work next to the Pfizer factory in Perth but they have three huge hindrances in Australia.
1. They aren't allowed to advertise prescription medicine.
2. They aren't allowed to offer payola to doctors for using their drugs. Both the doctor and the company get busted if they get caught.
3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.