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Researchers Claim Success In Removing HIV From Living Cells (nature.com)

Posted by timothy on from the nobel-material dept.

ffkom writes: A recent publication from German researchers claims success in removing the HI-Virus from living cells, showing a way to completely cure AIDS rather than just suppressing its symptoms (by lowering the amount of viruses) by permanent medication: "Current combination antiretroviral therapies (cART) efficiently suppress HIV-1 reproduction in humans, but the virus persists as integrated proviral reservoirs in small numbers of cells. To generate an antiviral agent capable of eradicating the provirus from infected cells, we employed 145 cycles of substrate-linked directed evolution to evolve a recombinase (Brec1) that site-specifically recognizes a 34-bp sequence present in the long terminal repeats (LTRs) of the majority of the clinically relevant HIV-1 strains and subtypes. Brec1 efficiently, precisely and safely removes the integrated provirus from infected cells and is efficacious on clinical HIV-1 isolates in vitro and in vivo, including in mice humanized with patient-derived cells. Our data suggest that Brec1 has potential for clinical application as a curative HIV-1 therapy." Clinical trials are expected to start in Hamburg, Germany, soon.

18 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. HIV articles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Are like battery/solar power articles. The best battery/HIV cure is just 2 years away. Always. But it never happens.

    1. Re:HIV articles by ArylAkamov · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Pretty much. I remember hearing about a possible cure for aids years ago, researchers claimed it worked in mice and it was months away from human testing.

      Never saw another word about it. It would be nice if they would at least say why it didn't work in humans instead of MASSIVE HYPE and then nothing.

    2. Re:HIV articles by DamonHD · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not all research works out. Research is hard. If it wasn't then it would be a risk. If you only want finished products then camp out in a Apple store and stop reading Slashdot. This type of entitled whining is very very dull and adults should avoid it.

      I'm running a research project right now. Guess what, bits of it aren't working as expected, but some of those failures are actually interesting and may save someone else a bunch of trouble.

      Damon

      --
      http://m.earth.org.uk/
    3. Re:HIV articles by ElRabbit · · Score: 3, Funny

      Like they say in the article, it's pure marketing that the thing could be used on humans. The real goal is to cure mice from any known disease, have them live forever and make them take over the world tonight.

    4. Re: HIV articles by opus_magnum · · Score: 2

      Yes. That shit does happen. A lot. About one in 10 successful lab tests works in animals and of those, about one in 10 will actually work in humans. Think it's not worth publishing of something works in mice?

      On the other hand, how does one find out about treatments that work on humans but not on mice?

    5. Re:HIV articles by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 2

      Are like battery/solar power articles. The best battery/HIV cure is just 2 years away. Always. But it never happens.

      Could be worse it could be like fusion

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

    6. Re:HIV articles by dave420 · · Score: 2

      If he read the actual literature on the topic he'd be fine. Getting one's scientific information from the mainstream media is not very wise.

  2. Zombie Movies by IntentionalStance · · Score: 3, Funny

    Don't most of them start with a discovery like this. Just saying.

    1. Re:Zombie Movies by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Funny

      We're talking about a show where the technobabble frequently was little more than Geordy announcing "a concentrated tachyon beam tuned to the right frequency will yada yada yada...", with Data piping in "There's a 72.3% probability that that will blah blah blah and blow us all up", with Riker just rolling his eyes and thinking "I know this gig pays well, but...", and Picard finally saying "Make it so. I'll be in my quarters, but inform me immediately when yada yada yada makes blah blah blah happen." Troi, of course, will simple stand there looking like she just pinched a loaf in her form fitting stretch one piece body suit, while Dr. Crusher goes down to sickbay to deal with the inevitable injuries and psychoses brought on by the inevitable yada yada yadaing.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  3. Hopefully It Really Works by nateman1352 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If this actually works it could be one of the most important advances in human medicine for decades. Hopefully it actually works and isn't the typical vaporware HIV cure.

  4. Other resident viruses? by bosef1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I haven't even RTFA yet, but I was wondering if this could have applications with other viruses that become long-term residents of the body. I'm thinking of things in the herpes family like... herpes, or chickenpox / shingles. The trick with most of these is long-term, mostly-dormant viruses hiding in the cells. If you can wake them up, the immune system can clear them, but they are effectively hidden inside the cells while quiescent.

    1. Re:Other resident viruses? by dsmatthews9379 · · Score: 2

      And cancers too perhaps, "site-specifically recognizes a ... sequence".

    2. Re:Other resident viruses? by kinko · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I haven't even RTFA yet, but I was wondering if this could have applications with other viruses that become long-term residents of the body. I'm thinking of things in the herpes family like... herpes, or chickenpox / shingles. The trick with most of these is long-term, mostly-dormant viruses hiding in the cells. If you can wake them up, the immune system can clear them, but they are effectively hidden inside the cells while quiescent.

      HIV is a "retrovirus", which means the the virus's DNA integrates into the host's DNA. Some other viruses do this, but I think most don't. Some are more interesting, eg EBV is a virus from the herpes family which infects several different tissue types, and we know it can integrate into human DNA inside white blood cells, but I don't think there's proof that it can integrate inside liver or stomach cells.

      As a retrovirus, the HIV sequence successfully breaks into a cell, then breaks into the cell's nucleus, then into one of the nucleus' chromosomes. (This is obviously harder to detect than viruses that stay inside the cell's cytoplasm, or that enter the nucleus but stay apart as their own episome [mini-chromosome].) That's what the article is referring to when they say their method recognises a 34-base pair long sequence - it is recognising that piece of the viral sequence in our own chromosome, and then uses something to snip out enough of the viral sequence that it can no longer make new copies of itself.

      Obviously you want to be careful with any therapy that involves cutting up bits of human chromosomes... :)

    3. Re:Other resident viruses? by Gaygirlie · · Score: 4, Informative

      They have just recently tried removing cancer via modified cells, forcing the immune-system to remove the cancer-cells: http://arstechnica.com/science...

      There are some downsides to this at the moment, but they are trying to perfect the technique. The takeout that someone should take from this, however, is that the researchers have shown it's possible to create a "vaccine" against certain kinds of cancers -- that is a MAJOR fucking step forward.

    4. Re:Other resident viruses? by ffkom · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I am pretty sure we'll see more attempts on removing also other retro viruses from living human cells, if only because techniques like CRISPR/CAS9 have recently made "live editing" of genes so much more feasible.

      Along with curing hereditary diseases, this is the obvious "good use case" for editing the genome in living humans.

      I'm sure elsewhere in the world, researchers are also already working on the obvious "evil use cases", like breeding gene-doped athletes, unscrupulous soldiers, will-less slaves etc..

  5. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gotta disagree with you saying that 88% isn't good enough.

    1) If current measures are reducing transmission of HIV to R values (new cases per existing case) of something like 1.2 or lower, this could bring it below the threshold of being able to increase in numbers and thus speed eradication.

    2) If 88% of CURRENT HIV+ are completely cured, drugs and resources saved can be concentrated on the remaining 12%, thus reducing R values even further, speeding eradication.

    3) 88% cure rate is a pretty massive reduction in human suffering, isn't it?

    --PM

  6. Re:And now... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

    It would be interesting to see if this method might be effective for other chronic viral infections, such as rabies or hepatitis infections that were found after symptoms began showing up where it's too late for vaccination.

  7. Re:So Many by Beezlebub33 · · Score: 2

    1. You are incorrect about HIV transmission. In the US, yes, it _was_ largely a gay disease. It is not, and has not been, primarily about gay men for a long time now. In the places where it is most devastating (Africa), it has never been about men fucking each other in the ass.

    2. The time / money spent on a disease depends on many factors, and it's a limited pool so, yes, spending money on HIV means less for others. But:

    A. the effect of HIV worldwide has been huge, even compared to other diseases.

    B. What we learn about HIV can be applied to many other communicable diseases.

    --
    The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.