

Doctors Inject HIV Into Dying Girl [video] - Brajeshwar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6SzI2ZfPd4

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b0rsuk
The idea is not new:

"""Julius Wagner von Jauregg (1857-1940), Austrian psychiatrist and Nobel
Prize winner who discovered that advanced cases of syphilis, a sexually
transmitted disease (STD), can be cured by deliberately infecting the patient
with malaria. Until the development of the antibiotic penicillin in the 1940s
made Wagner von Jauregg`s malaria cure obsolete, he achieved remarkable
success in curing patients of a dreaded disease that had been thought to be
incurable. For his development of the malaria cure for syphilis, Wagner von
Jauregg received the 1927 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine."""

[http://www.mediahex.com/Wagner_von_Jauregg_Julius](http://www.mediahex.com/Wagner_von_Jauregg_Julius)

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coopdog
Amazing. I wonder though, what happens to the HIV?

What I got from the video is that they modify the virus so it won't cause
disease and rather just modifies the host t-cells to recognize cancer. Does
the virus remain in the host system? Can it still spread? If it spreads what
happens to the newly infected person: cancer proof, nothing or HIV?

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kevingadd
Presumably the way they stop it from being a disease is that they disable the
virus's ability to reproduce, somehow. Or otherwise impair its function so
that it doesn't behave in the way traditional HIV does.

Hypothetically speaking here, if they put enough of the virus in her system
it'd be able to act upon enough of her immune system to get those cancer-
killing T cells spread around her entire body and kill enough of the cancer to
stop it from coming back. At that point, maybe it's okay if all those T cells
die off and her body doesn't know how to kill the leukemia anymore, because
it's gone?

Cancer and remission are pretty complex, so I don't know. But that seems
plausible to me.

I expect that leaving the virus able to actually spread would be harmful, even
if it's been altered to target cancer cells. It would probably alter the
immune system in other ways and potentially compromise it?

EDIT: According to another source I just looked at, the cancer-fighting T
cells actually do replicate. So I'm not at all sure how they mitigate the
downsides to that. Maybe this is a case of it being worth the downsides.

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nkoren
Yes -- people these days can live more or less indefinitely with HIV, given a
good antiretroviral regiment. Not so with leukaemia. As horrible as it is to
say, that's a trade I'd make in a second, if it were me.

(Days ago, my friends lost their six-year-old daughter -- who looked very much
like Emma in the video -- to leukaemia. So I'm very much in one of those "fuck
cancer" rages right now...)

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csense
XKCD mentioned this a while ago.

[1] [http://xkcd.com/938/](http://xkcd.com/938/)

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vaishak2future
Wow

