How excited should I be about this new gene therapy which appears to make T-cells immune to HIV?

Yay! Yes, you and everyone should be very excited.

Very good.

This looks like a huge step in the right direction. Any progress is exciting, this is very interesting!

I don’t want to get too excited until I know that it’s not SSDD.

Not too excited yet- sounds like it’s only in vitro. A lot of times, unfortunately, such discoveries don’t work well in whole organisms :>(

Many people seem unaware that we’ve been capable of curing HIV infection for years—so long as it’s caught within the first 24 hours. This is the reason why many countries have begun passing so-called “good samaritan” laws which force someone to be blood-tested if they bite an emergency responder such as a paramedic or a cop. The treatment (involving a barrage of anti-virals) has so many serious side effects and makes the recipient so ill that it can’t be used casually, only in the case of definite infection.

HIV is unlikely to ever have a “magic bullet.” It will be slowly worn down by treatment on once side, while the virus adapts to its host in less deadly ways on the other. Virii which kill their host are generally unsuccessful in the long run, which is why diseases gradually become more benign over time; the flu virus which makes you ill for a day or two today is the very same which killed 100 million people in the early 20th century. Strains of virus which kill tend to die out, while those which make peace with their host and are merely an annoyance tend to prosper. Already there are signs in Africa that HIV has started to become friendlier to its host.

Eventually we will reach an equilibrium where HIV has a low enough lethality that additional money spent on research will show diminishing returns, and at that point we’ll have a new “common cold” which culls the very young, very old, and weak, but is otherwise tolerable.

I share @crisw‘s concern that it’s early to get excited about this as a magic bullet. It may be one more piece of ammunition in the arsenal to battle AIDS, but my impression is its going to take a full arsenal to have assurance of winning the war. Still, it is very encouraging news, and I expect the future holds many more breakthroughs in gene therapies.

I really want to be excited each time I read up on something like this (thanks for the links) but like you I always think back to all the “cures” that came before. I sincerely hope I’m wrong and this is the one to lead the way to a cure/vaccine. (I’m firmly in the “HIV will be cured in my lifetime” camp, just no idea when or how as of yet)

This isn’t my area of expertise, but I try to keep up. From reading the abstract one line that jumped out was

When induced, MazF is known to cause Bak- and NBK-dependent apoptotic cell death in mammalian cells.

I don’t know what the “Bak and NBK-dependent” portion is (anyone help there?) but the rest means the enzyme they are triggering causes cell death. Good if you’re killing HIV, bad if you’re killing just about anything else. I’m wondering why this wouldn’t have the possibility of killing other, non-targeted cells.

Again, not questioning the research, they know far more about this than I do, just interested.

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As far as I know, no gene therapy is yet available to treat anything. It’s an exciting area of research and there’s no doubt it’s time will come, but we’re just not there yet.

Another form of gene therapy that this sounds very similar to is the VRX496 trials that are ongoing. That is actually in human trials and has shown promise there but still seems to be years away unfortunately. The fact trials were started a while back shows how frustratingly slow this sort of thing is from conception to distribution right now. Hopefully testing and approval will speed up once gene therapy as a whole becomes more accepted and understood, but so far the seal is still on and everyone is being extra careful.

More possibilities can only be a good thing, I just wish more would move forward from theoretical to actually being applied. How careful do you have to be when millions of people are dying?

Thanks so much all – this is why I wanted to discuss this – the results of this are unclear to me because of the technical aspects of it…

@funkdaddy As I recall in reading the study itself (what part of it I could decipher) the targeting occurs by using the long terminal repeat (LTR) of HIV-1 to introduce the mazF that triggers the cell death mechanism you noted. So it would only target cells that had the HIV-1 viron bound to them. It sounds as it the extent of testing to date is on cell cultures in a Petri dish, though. Until mammalian and human tests are conducted, we won’t know that this “cure” isn’t worse than the problem it is meant to resolve. Keeping fingers crossed. It does sound hopeful in an area where so little hope is found, and this opens the door to other similar methods of targeting HIV by using it as a cell marker to cause infected cells to self destruct.