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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.
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.