Gene therapy could offer AIDS cure

Maureen Martino — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:04:17 -0500

New hope for an AIDS cure: An AIDS patient being treated for leukemia received a bone marrow transplant that may have cured him of the deadly disease.

When American AIDS patient living in Berlin needed the a bone marrow transplant after failing first-line leukemia treatment. Hematologist Dr. Gero Hütter pursued the standard second-line treatment--a bone marrow transplant--but used marrow from a donor who had a natural genetic mutation that made him immune to HIV. The patient is still recovering from leukemia but since getting the transplant, "doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days," report the Wall Street Journal.

About 1 percent of Europeans harbor a genetic mutation which prevents the molecule CCR5 from appearing on the surface of a cell. Most HIV strains require CCR5 to be present in order to infect the cell, so people who don't carry it are virtually immune to the disease. This case offers new hope that researchers could use gene therapy to re-engineer patients' own genetics to over come a disease that has defeated scientists for decades.

- see the Wall Street Journal article

HIV research summit seeks new discovery path

John Carroll — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:24:33 -0400

Twenty-five years after the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus, top scientists from around the world gathered at the Pasteur Institute to mark major advances in the field and come to terms with some of the grim realities that now afflict their work. Swiftly identifying the virus that causes AIDS and the development of a drug cocktail in the ‘90s were both signal achievements. But the scientists also called for new thinking, new researchers and new money to address recent defeats in finding a vaccine and a vaginal gel needed to stop the spread of the disease.

"We still don't completely understand the various forms of the virus. It's more complicated for us than we thought," said France's Luc Montagnier, who helped discover the link between HIV and AIDS.

Jean-Francois Delfraissy, director of France's National Agency for AIDS Research, called for a new look at the cellular biology at work and Alice Dautry, head of the Pasteur Institute, demanded a multidisciplinary approach that could tackle every problem from all directions.

"Some fundamental biological questions are needed (to be addressed) before some vaccines go forward, or we tend to waste money, produce a depressing atmosphere in the field and take money away from the basic science that is needed right now," said AIDS pioneer Robert Gallo.

- read the article from AFP

AIDS research

Gene therapy could offer AIDS cure

HIV research summit seeks new discovery path