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'Boston Patients' Still HIV Free After Quitting Antiretroviral Meds
ananyo writes "Two men with HIV may have been cured after they received stem-cell transplants to treat the blood cancer lymphoma, their doctors announced today at the International AIDS Society Conference in Kuala Lumpur. One of the men received stem-cell transplants to replace his blood-cell-producing bone marrow about three years ago, and the other five years ago. Their regimens were similar to one used on Timothy Ray Brown, the 'Berlin patient' who has been living HIV-free for six years and is the only adult to have been declared cured of HIV. Last July, doctors announced that the two men — the 'Boston patients' — appeared to be living without detectable levels of HIV in their blood, but they were still taking antiretroviral medications at that time."
The story reports that they have only been off of medication for seven and fifteen weeks and they won't know for a year, but signs are looking positive.
The only real cure we have for this disease.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
The story reports that they have only been off of medication for seven and fifteen weeks and they won't know for a year, but signs are looking positive.
Phrasing >=(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6szE_qmzavQ
surely, signs are looking negative?
I remember recently there was some talk about research into curing some cancers by removing the patient's bone marrow, using HIV (ironically) to modify it, then transplanting that bone marrow back to the patient. What are the chances that something similar could be done here? To me it seems like all the pieces are in place; we know which gene confers some immunity, we are capable of editing targeted genes, and we can perform the bone marrow transplant. A marrow transplant would still be dangerous, but allotropic transplants are much less so since you get rid of the risk of graft vs host occurring.
There's a good chance this 'cure' will kill the patent. It works, but it's dangerous. The choice is between a treatment that may kill you now, or a disease that will kill you eventually. And either way you'll get to take lots and lots of drugs with nasty side effects.
Good, because it's your turn next.
"signs are looking positive."
I hope not. Wouldn't that rather spoil the point?
now that this gen-X'er is old and married we have 20-minute at-home HIV tests and a cure is in sight
Except the stem cell treatment in this case was for cancer.
But don't let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy.
Risks of a bone marrow transplant make it *very* unfavourable as a treatment for HIV in most cases. Fancy cutting off your foot to cure that veruca?
I wonder when some church is going to claim their did it.
And another will claim these people are no longer human.
morcego
From an historical perspective: Covered wagon travel has become quite inexpensive, and costs a few bucks for a team of oxen, so it's not surprising to see a more expensive means of travel appear. A steam locomotive is a cash cow, with related costs adding up $15-30 USD.
Of course stem cell transplants are expensive now, but having a clear road ahead for AIDS treatment opens the door to future optimization and improvement. As the technique matures, it will become routine enough that the cutting-edge treatments you read about on Slashdot will indeed continue to be expensive replacements for current technologies, and those technologies will themselves become cheaper as they mature. Of course, as the cures mature and become part of every doctor's toolbox, the general public, including yourself, will cease to pay any attention to their dropping costs or minor improvements.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Are these the same stem cells that the Christian Right was trying to ban for research?
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Oh, no.. God will punish us with all his might...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
re: "blood cancer lymphoma"
Leukemia is a blood cancer.
Lymphoma is, like the name suggests, lymphic system.
as long as there's money to be made in selling the treatment you can be sure there won't be a cure.
Such as with smallpox and rinderpest, right? Might as well include polio on the list as well since except for some pockets in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thanks to the Taliban and their distrust of modern medicine (like you apparently), polio is essentially gone from this planet.
Just think how much money these companies have lost by finding a cure for these afflictions rather than just treating them. Potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. How horrible that they found a cheap cure rather than sticking it to people with high priced treatments.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The previous "cure" was following a bone marrow transplant from someone with a mutation that made them highly resistant to HIV. This article makes it sound as though it was the transplant itself that cured the HIV. Does anyone know if these transplants also involved a resistant donor?
Though they mostly were before, HIV transmission through that route is still not that bad. Now, IV drug use, that is where it spreads like wildfire. In fact, there is some speculation that bad drug policy which drove people to IV drugs and then to share needles that actually caused the first wave of the AIDS epidemic.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_pisani_sex_drugs_and_hiv_let_s_get_rational_1.html
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
A patient of chemo for cancer will take many thousands of dollars each year to combat their disease, so this is where cancer treatment seems to have stalled out in the US.
Or maybe it's because treating cancer is insanely fucking difficult, because it isn't actually one disease but hundreds or thousands of different cellular regulation disorders which simply happen to have broadly similar effects, because really weeding out every last tumor cell would require therapies so drastic that they'd be likely to kill the patient, and because many cancers tend to evolve drug resistance over time. The costs of cancer go way beyond prescriptions for a few name-brand drugs (which aren't even available for everything); they include older therapies, hospitalization, and surgery. Insurance companies would save multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient if there was a magic drug that cured cancer, and would happily pay a large amount for such a drug, so it's not like there's no profit to be had.
HIV levels go to undetectable in many HIV-drug patients, then reappear once off the drugs even if they have taken them over a decade. It was postulated there was a mystery resevoir for the virus. And/or it integrated into the victims DNA.
The solution is easy. Remove the profit motive, and base all medical research and treatment on clinical need, not profit.
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
What you get in America, is expensive gold-plated crap for the Worried Well, and dick pills and statins for rich old men too irresponsible to look after themselves. Meanwhile, half the developing world is dying of preventable disease, because Big Pharma and their warped priorities don't see any profit in it.
"but signs are looking positive" I think they mean signs are looking negative, lol.
one of my best friends is a biochem PhD who told me about this approach a few years ago but with a twist: he said they've isolated the sequence that causes the HIV resistance & that in a few yrs it should be possible to extract some of patients own marrow, splice it in, culture & replace. in theory you don't need to kill off patients own marrow as long as you can culture & inject enough to produce enough resistant T cells...
problem is even if (probably when) they solve the remaining technical problems it isn't scalable as a treatment & would likely only ever be affordable to the Magic Johnson class patients...
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research... They are always the product of government funded or subsidized research.
Unless I'm mistaken, that's what they used to say about chemotherapy.
They still do. Chemotherapy is quite dangerous and even in the best cases is pretty brutal on the patient. I've had the misfortune to see several people close to me go through chemo and it is an awful treatment with no guarantee of success. In some cases the chemo itself can be lethal.
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
In no small part those results are due to those state managed health care systems getting a free ride on the back of research conducted by US companies. 12 of the top 20 medical device companies are based in the US. The US spends about $140 billion on medical research each year (roughly half from industry, a third from government and the rest from various philanthropic organizations) and much of the rest of the world gets to avoid this cost. It's much easier and cheaper to wait for someone else to figure out the cure and then just copy it.
While I'm not going to defend the flaws in the US healthcare system (which you rightly point out are many), part of the reason is because the US is paying the much of the cost of all the research everyone else gets to enjoy.
More than speculation. You can look it up in the American Journal of Public Health. That's pretty much the conclusion of all the researchers in the field.
In New York City around 1985, half the AIDS cases were gay men, and the other half were IV drug users. The public health people were fighting with the Giuliani administration (mayor) and the Pataki administration (governor).
This was nothing new. It was well-known that many infections were spread by IVDUs re-using needles. Hepatitis C probably caused more deaths than AIDS. And yet these idiots kept making it illegal to possess clean needles. They used to say, "The risk of dirty needles will discourage people from using IV drugs." Yeah, think that one out for a second. That was like, "If people could get safe abortions, it would promote immorality."
Pataki claimed he couldn't support clean needles until his health commissioner, Barbara DeBuono, had reviewed the issue. DeBuono said she hadn't gotten around to reading the literature. DeBono finally lost her job when she got caught shoplifting. http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-10-08/news/pataki-s-sick-department-of-health/
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research... They are always the product of government funded or subsidized research.
... and who do you think the government is funding or subsidizing? Oh! That's right, the corporate research facilities.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...to butt fuck each other with impunity!
With Obamacare just around the corner...you are correct. We are ALL next.
First, you (or the other AC) attempted to blame the whole situation on homosexual -- a myth that HIV is from homosexual. The HIV is also from heterosexual as well (especially prostitution) and is under radar. Please take the bias out of the context.
Then you are pulling politic into the topic; whereas, there is no relation to the topic at all. So both posts of AC are flame bait.
Now back to the topic, I believe that incubation period if HIV can be longer than 1 year -- http://www.healthalert.net/Dispelling_Misconceptions/?p=31 -- so they should not make a BIG news out of their experiment when only a couple months have passed. This is just to get publicity. What would happen if all the sudden it is no longer true (they found the HIV again on the patients)?
I wonder if the specific drugs used in the SCT conditioning regimen matter? The Berlin patient, AFAIK, received BEAM (carmustine, etoposide, melphalan and, significantly, cytarabine/ARA-C). ARA-C is antiviral in addition to cytotoxic - I wonder if the massive doses of ARA-C reduced the viral load enough that the graft-vs-host effect and immune reconstitution obliterated the rest of the HIV infection?
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research... They are always the product of government funded or subsidized research.
... and who do you think the government is funding or subsidizing? Oh! That's right, the corporate research facilities.
Not in Europe or other civilised places. In civilised countries, public health is studied by public research institutions at public universities.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I had CLL. I received chemotherapy twice in three years.
Doctor decided that a bone marrow transplant was worth the risk, since I was going to run out of chemo options really quickly at that rate.
So, had allogenic stem cell transplant. Donor was almost a perfect match (he had a virus that I'd never been exposed to, but otherwise perfect).
No longer have CLL (yes, they check regularly, and will do so for a long time to come).
So, no, cancer treatment hasn't "stalled out" in the USA. It's progress is just...spotty. Some forms of cancer are easier to deal with than others, and some forms of treatment are becoming safer than they used to be....
P.S. Oh, and if you want to do something vaguely worthwhile, try donating bone marrow/stem cells - http://bethematch.org/. You might just save a life....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
We have publicly-funded medical research in America too. In fact, it dwarfs most other countries, both in terms of money and productivity. The problem is that this research doesn't automatically lead to cures - developing new therapies is still extraordinarily expensive and slow. There have been many solutions proposed for this, but it's hard to point to an example where massive government spending magically solves the problem. It's also worth pointing out that the treatment covered in this article was done in the US, at a Harvard-associated hospital, and I would be surprised if NIH funding was not involved.
Aside from the research, I think you're also misunderstanding the nature of other first-world healthcare systems. The NHS in Britain is towards one extreme, where not only the insurance but most of the hospitals are state-run, but on the other end, there are plenty of countries with essentially private healthcare (providers and insurers) not so dissimilar from America's. What they have in common is effective universal coverage and far more government regulation of insurance than in the US. But it is not simply a matter of the government nationalizing the entire system, despite what ideologues on both the left and the right would claim.
What you get in America, is expensive gold-plated crap for the Worried Well, and dick pills and statins for rich old men too irresponsible to look after themselves. Meanwhile, half the developing world is dying of preventable disease, because Big Pharma and their warped priorities don't see any profit in it.
So what's your solution? The American government isn't going to step in and cure all those diseases in the developing world, because the taxpayers don't want their government pouring billions into TB and malaria research instead of the diseases that they personally have. On the other hand, Bill Gates is now using his (ill-earned) billions to fight these diseases.
Mostly universities.
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research
Except that, to the extent that HIV is now largely survivable for those with access to the drugs, AIDS was cured by corporate R&D (aided, of course, by a lot of government-subsidized academic basic research). You can split hairs over whether protease inhibitor cocktails count as a "cure", but if you actually RTFA, maybe you'd understand why the pharma companies concentrated on making simpler treatments. Bone marrow transplants for every AIDS patient in the world is not a trivial matter.
Not in Europe or other civilised places. In civilised countries, public health is studied by public research institutions at public universities.
We do this in America too - perhaps you've heard of the National Institutes of Health? But ultimately the actual drugs are made by private companies in most places, Europe included, because drug development is such a shitty business that most governments would (wisely) prefer to let someone else deal with it.
Oh, no.. God will punish us with all his might...
Fusta... Grow up a little, eh? Can you do that for us?
Sure, reverend, whatever you say.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I would like to live for 10,000 years. I wonder if Stemcell transplant options could mkae that a possibility.
Republicans *ARE* our punishment...
It's damned hard for a man to get HIV without giving oral sex, getting anal sex, or shared needles. HIV is a blood-bourne disease that we got from butchering monkeys.
And you're less likely to get it from a prostitute than you are from some drunk chick you pick up in a bar. Look up the stats.
Something that strikes me as odd is half of all homosexual black men in the US have HIV. I mean think about that - for every 100 black gay men you see, about 50 of them have HIV. Nobody really understands why either, because apparently they don't behave any riskier than any other HIV demographic.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/gay-black-men-hiv-rates-m_n_3368144.html
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
We're HIV Positive
First, you (or the other AC) attempted to blame the whole situation on homosexual -- a myth that HIV is from homosexual. The HIV is also from heterosexual as well
You seem to be suffering from the Acquired Noun Deficiency Syndrome. Don't worry, even though there's no cure for most people suffering from it, it's not lethal. (Unfortunately.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Merck Darmstadt and Bayer don't do R&D? That's news to me!