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New Antibody Attacks 99% of HIV Strains (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Scientists have engineered an antibody that attacks 99% of HIV strains and can prevent infection in primates. It is built to attack three critical parts of the virus -- making it harder for HIV to resist its effects. The work is a collaboration between the US National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Our bodies struggle to fight HIV because of the virus' incredible ability to mutate and change its appearance. These varieties of HIV -- or strains -- in a single patient are comparable to those of influenza during a worldwide flu season. So the immune system finds itself in a fight against an insurmountable number of strains of HIV. But after years of infection, a small number of patients develop powerful weapons called "broadly neutralizing antibodies" that attack something fundamental to HIV and can kill large swathes of HIV strains. Researchers have been trying to use broadly neutralizing antibodies as a way to treat HIV, or prevent infection in the first place. The study, published in the journal Science, combines three such antibodies into an even more powerful "tri-specific antibody." The experiments conducted on 24 monkeys showed none of those given the tri-specific antibody developed an infection when they were later injected with the virus. "We're getting 99% coverage, and getting coverage at very low concentrations of the antibody," said Dr Gary Nabel, the chief scientific officer at Sanofi and one of the report authors.
I know a couple of people who have lived for decades with HIV. Both are hemophiliacs and got the virus before there was testing of the blood supply. They both lived in the same region of the US and caught the virus about the same time. They have to take tons of medicines to stay alive and they're already being treated for hemophilia, so it sucks for them. If they can finally get cured, that would be great. They're really good people.
It sounds like this new antibody works a little bit like the various treatments they have for Hepatitis C. There are multiple genotypes of HepC and not all the drugs work for all the genotypes, but the medicines interfere with some protein or something and causes the HepC virus to not be able to "hide" from the immune system and it just ends up getting killed off. Completely. A disease that until 2014 couldn't be cured now has a treatment that is 90% effective. One pill a day for 12 to 24 weeks and virtually no side effects. And done. Cure. Completely. Unfortunately it costs like a quarter-million dollars so insurance companies won't let you have the treatment without a fight. They will first say no unless you have at least Stage 4 fibrosis (the stage before your liver starts dying), and then they make you jump through hoops and get multiple blood tests and ultrasounds and sometimes even liver needle biopsies (which actually damage the liver). Then, they'll deny you one more time hoping to run out the clock until you die. But if you have a good GI doctor, he'll go to bat for you and keep sending the prescription until it gets approved.
To give you an idea how stupid our insurance-based system is, it's not even the insurance company that's denying you. It's a company that the insurance company hires called a "Pharmacy Benefits Manager" who are even harder to deal with than the insurance company. Then, they'll do completely random things like force you to use a different specialty pharmacy to get the meds (because you can't get these meds at your regular Walgreens, you have to go through a specialty pharmacy who will deliver the drugs to you, because every bottle of 30 pills is worth like $60,000. It's all really stupid. In Canada, the treatment is a small fraction of the cost. In India, it costs about $400 (but medical tourism doesn't work because the pharma companies have cut a deal with the Indian government to require people to show an Indian passport before they can receive the medication).
I know all this because a musician I play with on a regular basis had HepC. He was getting sicker and sicker and my wife and I helped him a lot dealing with the insurance companies and pharmacy benefits managers and special pharmacies. The freaking medicine acted remarkably fast. Within 4 weeks, a guy who had been positive for HepC for 25 years was coming up negative for the virus on his blood tests. He felt better after only a few weeks. After 24 weeks, he was done. After another few months, he was tested, still negative. Since the liver regenerates, within 8 months, his fibrosis had gone from level 4 to level 3 to 2 and is now at level 1. Yes, it cost the insurance company a couple hundred grand (although it really didn't because the pharma companies make special deals with them where it only really costs a few grand) but it's still a LOT less than a liver transplant, which he would have needed eventually, or liver cancer treatment, which sucks really bad.
I'm sorry to write this long story, but a cure is a cure. I hope eventually they can cure HIV as easily as they can now cure HCV. And if you're a baby boomer or Gen Xer, you should get tested for HepC the next time you get blood drawn. You don't want to wait until your symptomatic to find out you got it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Our medical system has plenty of faults, but crazy conspiracy theories are not involved. If there was a conspiracy by big medical companies to hide cures because they make more money treating, then explain the following:
[a] The elites ALWAYS carve-out exscape hatches for themselves. Just look at Al Gore and friends who rant about Climate Change and demand the public change their use of energy etc - while THEY sail super-yachts, fly private jets to conferences at exotic vacation spots, own many glorious power and resource-sucking mansions and so forth and claim to be making up for it by buying "offsets" (google: indulgences and corrupt popes). Rich elite lawmakes put taxes on sodas and limit table salt (which affect middle-class and poor folks) but they do nothing about their expensive and fattening and salt and sugar-laden foods and beverages. Somehow, however, executives of big medical firms and their family members suffer the same diseases and unhappy demises as the rest of us.
[b] Big entities cannot keep secrets. There are always insiders who are opposed to a policy, or who see an injustice, or are personally affected, or see a hypocrisy they despise, or who want to puff-up their credentials with friends or relatives who end-up leaking stuff. Where are the current or former "insiders" who are publicly outraged to be ill or dying or have sick or dying family members who are blowing the whistle on the particular executives who are hiding these magical mystery cures while making sure they themselves and their kin have access to those cures?
The simple FACT is that human beings are remarkably complex biological machines. An individual blood cell is frighteningly complicated and not fully-understood nor human-engineerable. Bone cells, kidney cells, liver cells etc are all similarly brain-bending in complexity and when you gang all of these together into a complex creature and then add-in a virus - well I personally am impressed by ANY drug advance. When you consider how difficult it is to find ANY new medicine, add-in the idea that we have probably discovered all the "easy" to discover drugs, then consider the enourmous resources to find a new drug and clear the massive pile of government regulations to get a drug approved, it's even more amazing ANY drug advance is possible.
Oh, I personally have a chronic illness and have experienced the annoyance of hearing about "breakthroughs" periodically and seeing nothing that helps ME, while also having a family member with a very serious illness who is currently involved as a subject in a drug trial program. If you ever find yourself in that tough spot and are a good candidate to be a test subject, DO IT. It may be very unpleasant and painful and embarassing and lots of other stuff and my do nothing for YOU but your participation could eventually contribute to a new drug or a better understanding and thus save or improve the lives of an uncountable number of people. Imagining conspiracies that do not exist only makes people hostile and bitter; it does NOTHING to improve the condition of any human being and is a completely self-centered non-productive waste of human energy.
If 24/24 of the subjects managed to survive without infection, then it's clearly not useless.