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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."
Let us celebrate with a trip to the brothel!
I might be slightly paranoid and I hope I am wrong, but why would big pharmacy want to produce this? They have a choice between selling someone a whole life really expensive medicines (well not to make, but to buy) or cure him... I am just going to assume that this method will be deemed 'unsafe'.
Just starting animal trials. Too early to know if it's really going to work.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Like announcements that a rediscovery of some 18th century quack physics leads that "may lead to a possible way to make batteries with 500% more storage capacity" - the key work is may. It also may not, but you wont know till the money si all gone.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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."
Um... Doesn't that WP article actually prove you wrong while corroborating just about everything the GP said?
From the linked FA in your own post:
Schmidt, an only child, was born on February 24, 1967, in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska.
Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist "since I was about five-years-old" but "... I did some work at the USA National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn't enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be—there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant." His decision to study astronomy, which he had seen as "a minor pastime", was made just before he enrolled at university. He earned his BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received his MA (Astronomy) in 1992 and then PhD (Astronomy) in 1993 from Harvard University. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.
At Harvard, he met his future wife, the Australian (Jenny) Jennifer M. Gordon who was a PhD student in economics. In 1994, he moved to Australia.
So, Australian citizenship or not (I assume he has it by now), it's kind of a stretch to accurately describe the guy as Australian.
How is HIV passed from women to men? Does it go down the man's urethra and somehow into his bloodstream? How, exactly? How much HIV is present in vaginal fluids, and how much, if any, vaginal fluid, goes down a man's urethra when he is having sex?
Did any of you idiots bother to THINK about basic stuff like this?
You clearly haven't, since all you're doing is asking the questions. Why don't you go out and find the answers? Then come back and present a little thing that the rest of us like to call "evidence."
I'll do the first one for you. The second one is your homework.
For HIV to be able to infect someone it has to cross through the mucosal membranes (the skin that lines the vagina, cervix, rectum, urethra (hole where urine/pee/semen comes out), mouth, nose, etc).
Contrary to popular belief, there does not have to be a cut or a tear in the membrane for HIV to pass through (though the presence of such will increase that persons risk should they be exposed).
I got that from Yahoo! Answers, fer chris'sakes. It's not heard.
Do some RESEARCH
Good advice. Why don't you follow it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The cold virus and most other viruses are not dependent on a protein that boosts transcriptiuon of the virus like apparently HIV is.
Otherwise you would have a universal blockage of production of any virus.
I can't say for certain without full access to the paper, but based on the use of a retroviral vector and Dr. Harrich's comments in the video interview, I think the idea would be to infect a population of your hematopoietic stem cells with retroviruses that carry the Nullbasic (mutant copy of Tat) gene. That procedure would be similar to the autologous HSC transplants used in treatment of some leukemias and lymphomas- but then they'd infect the HSCs with the retroviral vector before they put them back in you.
Upon successful infection, the RNA genome of the vector is converted via reverse transcriptase to a DNA sequence. The vector will also produce some enzymes that will integrate the Nullbasic-DNA gene into the DNA genome of your stem cells. If successful, those cells will now produce Nullbasic protein. Since they are stem cells, they will produce Nullbasic-positive blood cells, some of which will be the CD4+ T-cells that HIV infects.
HIV will still infect these cells, inject its RNA genome into the cell, which will be converted to DNA, integrated into the host cell genome, transcribed back to RNA, then translated to viral proteins by the cell's machinery. However, the host cell also makes Nullbasic protein, which act like HIV's Tat, and will interact with the same enzymes, transcription factors, etc., but instead of boosting their functions, it will inhibit them. In theory, HIV would reproduce so slowly in your population of Nullbasic+ T-cells that it simply wouldn't be a disease- the population would never fall to the point of causing immunodeficiency.
The phrase, "in theory" could also apply to most of the other steps I outlined above, of course.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Haha, Oh my days.
As a doctor in the UK who has worked in the largest centre for HIV in Europe (Chelsea and Westminster hospital, at the GUM/infectious diseases centre there) I can tell you that fewer people are dying of AIDS for the exact reason you mock, drugs are saving their lives. These aren't wonder drugs, and they aren't nice drugs for your body in many ways, but they do work well.
Here's a great page describing the HAART and modified HAART regimes that we mostly use nowadays http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1533218-overview
To give you an idea of how effective these treatments are life expectancy in someone newly diagnosed with HIV with a high CD4 count in the UK is now expected to be only one year less than if they had not been infected. Not that that means their life will be easy, the drugs have a lot of side effects and they will often be very ill for a long time before they die, and the drugs cost a lot, but they will live.
I'm pretty sure those trials were ended early and the lower infection rate was mostly due to guys not engaging in sexual activities while they healed from the procedure. Afterwards they probably also noticed their sexual pleasure being reduced as the foreskin has a great deal of nerves and protects the head of the penis.
I never knew the greatness of foreskin due to doctors and my parents decided something that should have been left up to me to decide, but these guys will probably regret their decision.
So what's wrong with the tried and true method of not engaging in sexual activities with everything that moves?