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Researchers Block HIV Infection In Monkeys With Artificial Protein
An anonymous reader writes: Immunologists have developed a synthetic molecule that's able to attach to HIV and prevent it from interacting with healthy cells. "HIV infects white blood cells by sequentially attaching to two receptors on their surfaces. First, HIV's own surface protein, gp120, docks on the cell's CD4 receptor. This attachment twists gp120 such that it exposes a region on the virus that can attach to the second cellular receptor, CCR5. The new construct combines a piece of CD4 with a smidgen of CCR5 and attaches both receptors to a piece of an antibody. In essence, the AIDS virus locks onto the construct, dubbed eCD4-Ig, as though it were attaching to a cell and thus is neutralized." The new compound was tested in monkeys. After successively higher injections of HIV, all four monkeys who received the compound beforehand stayed from free infection. Any potential medical treatment is still a ways off — the researchers plan more trials in monkeys before involving humans in the testing.
This type of compounds (HIV fusion inhibitors) is already well known and available on the market e.g. Enfuvirtide
The only hope here is that this inhibitor will be cheaper and perform better in humans than already available ones. However, according to FA, these type of experiments are still way off..
More recent HIV treatments target portions of the virus that mutate slowly, and are moreover unlikely to be able to mutate more quickly. These have significantly higher chances of being a "cure" compared to the older cocktails to which you refer. Unfortunately it did take 20 years of AIDs research to figure this out and have the knowledge and technology to develop these techniques, but I think a very reliable vaccine will be readily available by the end of the decade, and a cure 5-10 years after that.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Hodgkin's Lymphoma is actually an outlier and a really useful example.
Hodgkin's is caused by a very specific mutation. Relatively early on, they realised that if you can poison the mutated cells without killing the patient, they get better. And if you're lucky, they don't just get better, they stay better, it's a bona fide cure.
This same idea (just kill the mutants) seems applicable to a lot of cancers, but Hodgkin's stands out because
1. Lots of young people get it. We don't know exactly why, but men in their 20s get it a lot (compared to say, lung cancer or other types of cancer, which mostly old people get). This means your cure has a remarkable effect. Old people were going to die soon anyway, but a 25 year old man cured of Hodgkins may well live 40-50 more years. So you can be 100% sure it's working.
2. One very specific cell that scientists already knew existed has one fairly obvious and easy to understand defect. They didn't know why yet, but the cells look all wrong under a microscope. Cured patients, and normal people who aren't sick don't have the characteristic cells. So if something kills those cells, but not the patient, it's a possible cure.
There is a downside to all this. We've been curing Hodgkin's for longer than we've done proper scientific medicine. The people who invented a cure didn't run a double blind trial to see how well it worked. They tried it, cured some people and went "Good work, time to go home". So today we have NO CLUE how bad Hodgkin's is exactly. If you're untreated at say, Stage IIb, can you expect to die in a year? Two years? Five years? We really don't know. Some people refuse treatment, and those tend to die horrible deaths a few years later, riddled with cancer and other problems, but not enough of them exist to have any confidence in an estimate and they're crazy people who avoid doctors, so who knows if it's a bad for normal people who just can't get cancer drugs.
Because we're sure it works it would be terribly unethical to run a trial now. You'd be condemning half the trial participants to death, just to prove a point! So we will probably never be sure.