

Laboratory mice completely cured of HIV through Tre-Recombinase - niico
http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1003587

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tokenadult
The original article title here is "Highly Significant Antiviral Activity of
HIV-1 LTR-Specific Tre-Recombinase in Humanized Mice," which is admittedly too
long for the Hacker News title limit of eighty characters. I might suggest a
more accurate submission title for the article could be made out of the
summary sentence in the abstract, "The presented data suggest that Tre-
recombinase might become a valuable component of a future therapy that aims at
virus eradication." So perhaps a submission title of "Tre-recombinase might
become a valuable future therapy for HIV" sums up the suggestion made by this
preliminary research finding. As usual, I recommend reading LISP hacker and
Google director of research Peter Norvig's online essay "Warning Signs in
Experimental Design and Interpretation"

[http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html](http://norvig.com/experiment-
design.html)

whenever we discuss preliminary research findings here on Hacker News. This
result may not be replicated--many, many preliminary research findings are
not. And this result in a mouse model may not translate into a safe and
effective treatment in human medicine. But as usual I am glad that scientists
all around the world are engaged in fundamental research in the hope of better
understanding nature.

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asciimo
The HIV problem in humanized mice is such a difficult problem. Even if we
overcome the technical challenges of mass-producing tiny condoms, and the
logistical challenges of distributing them, mice simply do not use them. The
cultural and educational challenges are too great.

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MDCore
Maybe if humanized mice practised abstinence until mice marriage they wouldn't
get HIV in the first place? Then we wouldn't be spending billions of dollars
trying to find them a cure.

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Hrodban
Read the entire thing, where does it say in any word or in medical terms that
they were "completely cured".

All I can see is hints to great progress in the field.

Exceprts:

"Clearly, it is not expected that HIV-1 can be eradicated by Tre activity
alone."

"Tre-recombinase technology can be a valuable component of such a multi-tiered
strategy to treat HIV-infected patients."

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ChuckMcM
That is certainly an interesting approach to the problem. If I read this
correctly "However, expressing an engineered HIV-1 long terminal repeat (LTR)
site-specific recombinase (Tre), shown to excise integrated proviral DNA in
vitro," they have expressed an RNA which targets _and replaces_ the viral DNA
in the cells with a non-HIV transcription. That reads a lot like some of the
more current gene therapy papers read, with permanent modification of cells
rather than simply killing target cells.

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Amarok
It's a step forward, but treatment is still a long way off:

"Independently of the selected gene therapy strategy, and prior to its
potential use in HIV-infected patients, vector technology has to be developed
that allows safe and efficient gene transfer followed by reliable transgene
expression in target cells"

Gene therapy isn't possible yet because we still can't control where the
transgenes get inserted into the human genome. There's the risk of disrupting
oncogenes/oncosuppressors, and the probability of getting cancer would be
high.

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DonGateley
Might this mean that we can resume the sexual revolution?

