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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!
Just starting animal trials. Too early to know if it's really going to work.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
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 would be a gene therapy treatment- using viral vector to express a mutant protein in your cells. Last year, the European Medicines Agency approved a gene therapy treatment for the first time (no approvals in the US currently). Glybera is indicated for lipoprotein lipase deficiency, a rare disorder that affects fatty acid metabolism. Glybera uses a viral vector to deliver a working copy of the LPL gene to cells; this proposed AIDS treatment would deliver a nonworking copy of TAT to infected cells in a similar fashion. I bring up Glybera for comparison purposes because it is expected to cost over 1 million dollars a patient for a course of treatment. Eventually, gene therapy may become such a routine way of creating treatments that costs will be very low. That is not the present situation.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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."
As a business why would I want to cure a person when I can keep making money by offering lifetime treatments?. That's just how it is with big Pharma, most intelligent people know this.
Big Pharma is actually more than one company, and company A doesn't care whether their cure for disease X makes the treatment of company B irrelevant.
If they started actually curing everything, their profits would fall and the markets would tank.
Because people can only get cancer once, and old people are not a better stream of revenue than young people, because Alzheimer medicine is not expensive.
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.
Protip: Medicines with the same Product License Number are the same. The number has to be printed on the packaging. If you compare various over-the-counter painkillers, for example, you will find that the cheap own-brand ones, the branded ones, the fast actions ones, the long lasting ones and the premium max strength ones all have the same Product License Number and are in fact exactly the same.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC