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CRISPR Eliminates HIV In Live Animals (genengnews.com)
Researchers from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh show that HIV-1 infections can be eliminated from the genomes of living animals. Findings from the study have been published in the journal Molecular Therapy. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News reports: This is the first study to demonstrate that HIV-1 replication can be completely shut down and the virus eliminated from infected cells in animals with a powerful gene-editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. The new work builds on a previous proof-of-concept study that the team published in 2016, in which they used transgenic rat and mouse models with HIV-1 DNA incorporated into the genome of every tissue of the animals' bodies. They demonstrated that their strategy could delete the targeted fragments of HIV-1 from the genome in most tissues in the experimental animals. In this new study, the LKSOM team genetically inactivated HIV-1 in transgenic mice, reducing the RNA expression of viral genes by roughly 60% to 95% -- confirming their earlier findings. They then tested their system in mice acutely infected with EcoHIV, the mouse equivalent of human HIV-1. In the third animal model, a latent HIV-1 infection was recapitulated in humanized mice engrafted with human immune cells, including T cells, followed by HIV-1 infection. "These animals carry latent HIV in the genomes of human T cells, where the virus can escape detection," Dr. Hu explained. Amazingly, after a single treatment with CRISPR/Cas9, viral fragments were successfully excised from latently infected human cells embedded in mouse tissues and organs.
Because this is how you get a zombie apocalypse.
Yeah, but how do we eliminate the "Biotech News Blues"?
"HIV-1 replication can be completely shut down and the virus eliminated from infected cells in animals with a powerful gene-editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9." I'm very glad to hearing this!
This could actually move people off antiretroviarals, and into long-term remission.
Don't expect a silver bullet - AIDS will be cured like cancer, driven into remission, and only "cured" after we're confident that it won't show up again later on.
In spite of that? I expect it's going to be far cheaper than treating patients with long duration HAART cocktails, and treating the side effects of those drugs. Even if each patient's viral strains have to be sequenced, and a CRISPR cocktail picked based on the strains harbored, AIDS drugs are not cheap. This could be a turning point representing the beginning of the end of AIDS.
This is great news if they can take it out of the lab! I also hope this can be applied to other viruses!
You're twice as stupid as you think you are.
HIV-1 is the most common and pathogenic strain of the virus.
HIV-2 has not been widely recognized outside of Africa.
HIV-2 has been found to be less pathogenic than HIV-1. The mechanism of HIV-2 is not clearly defined, nor the difference from HIV-1, however the transmission rate is much lower in HIV-2 than HIV-1.
source
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"I dunno how much AIDS scares y'all, but I got a theory: the day they come out with a cure for AIDS, a guaranteed one-shot cure, on that day there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man."
Not just that, but this sounds like an approach you could adapt to any virus.
Well, given how/why CRISPR/cas9 evolved in prokaryote in the first place.
Prokaryotes ended up with this systems because it helps them remove foreign DNA (phages, plasmids).
Curing HIV is about removing its foreign DNA from the infected white blood cells.
So CRISPR could be applied to curing viruses such as VIH.
Hey, what a surprise !
Yes, it could be used to eliminate tons of currently hard to cure viruses.
(Note: I'm not belittling the accomplishment of the researcher who developed this cure candidate.
There's surely a lot of work done to addapt to this use.
I'm just saying is that these kind of application is what bacteria evolved CRIPR for in the nature,
so it's not surprising that we could apply it for a similar task in eukaryote regarding viruses.
It's the "weirdly simple gene editor" use that is unexpected)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Gene editing, through every part of the organism reachable by the immune system, in a live mammal. HIV will ultimately be a mere footnote, because this technology is an early first step to editing your own genome as a consenting adult instead of fiddling around with the genes of a fertilized egg and hoping you haven't screwed over a future person's life in the process.
You won't be rebuilding large structures in the body with this, but there's still so much that can be done if you can alter genes in an adult. There are a lot of deleterious genetic conditions that can be corrected, and then you move on to upgrading.
Remember when you guys were claiming AIDS was a sent by God to punish homosexuals?
Well, it looks like maybe God wasn't as pissed off with them as you thought. Oopsie!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
is sure to be staggering....
Just when you though the drug companies cared more about lives than profit... ROFL ;-)
Ob. link to the song CRISPR-Cas9
several issues remain to be addressed prior to clinical trials. While an AAV serotype with broad tropism is ideal for proof-of-concept studies, replication competent HIV is rare (present only in one of every 10,000 to 1,000,000 CD4+ T cells), and thus identifying delivery vectors with high specificity to the HIV reservoir remains a significant hurdle. There is currently no known viral or non-viral agent that is capable of efficiently and selectively delivering and expressing transgenes in these cells. An ideal delivery candidate should possess the ability to carry a relatively large cargo to relevant reservoir cells and facilitate pharmacologically significant enzymatic activity. It should also exhibit little to no toxicity irrespective of the duration of its presence in vivo, whether transient or long term.
(emphasis mine)
Still, this is a very encouraging development toward a possible HIV cure.
So there are a couple options here. One is to actually modify an HIV genome to include the CRISPR/Cas system they used here, and use that as the delivery vector. You can also combine that with a shock and kill treatment - possibly using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. It's not going to be cheap or easy, but this is an additional tool.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Per this article in Scientific American--
Note the open-source mindset already beginning to surround CRISPR! Researchers are exchanging their CRISPR recipes without concern for patents and intellectual property. This can really accelerate progress with developing CRISPR-based treatments.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Yes! These de-clawed HIV vectors are known more broadly as therapeutic lentivirus. The problem is still efficiency - you have to not only hit every infected cell, but CRISPR editing has to go off without a hitch in those cells. Then there's the issue of turning off the transgene you've just delivered before "off target" cuts can induce chromosomal aberrations that can lead to cancer.
This isn't the first time researchers have used gene editing to tackle HIV infection. There is a clinical trial involving adenovirus delivery of zinc finger nucleases (a prior generation gene editing technology) to patient-derived blood stem cells to inactivate CCR5, an essential HIV receptor, on the surface of immune cells. Importantly, these cells are removed from patients, edited in the lab and returned to the body. This ensures that all NEW blood cells will be HIV resistant, but is also not a total genomic clearance of latent provirus.
I agree that a combination of approaches will probably be required to inactivate latent provirus as well as slow disease transmission. Public health approaches like needle exchanges and safe sex education are probably just as important for eliminating this disease.
Yep, I'm aware (also in the field) - that's why I suggested doing it in combination with a shock and kill approach where you pharmacologically reactivate the latent HIV reservoir, introduce CAR T cells to kill infected cells, and use lenti delivering the CRIPSR system - either to knock out HIV genomes or CCR5 (or both - luckily gRNAs are pretty small!). Off-target effects can be somewhat mitigated with the newer versions of Cas9 - Keith Joung is doing some particularly interesting work there.
Yeah, there's definitely more work to be done on the public health side. A vaccine that actually works would help a lot.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
I love how CRISPR makes geneticists act like a bunch of little kids who found a working go-cart someone left in a dumpster.
Except this time round, metaphorically they actually use it to really do go-cart laps on a nearby track (though necessarily the same track as the guy who threw it in the dumpster).
Unlike all the other times when they decide to re-purpose it for something completely different, like using it as a delivery vehicle with optional autonomous navigation (which actually works more or less),
or trying to conquer the world with it and at least managing to build a self-driving tank out of it (by strapping a bazooka on the precedent autonomous delivery vehicle).
This post was brought to you by the Slashdot's "Car Analogy Service(tm)".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]