
CRISPR eliminates HIV-1 infection in live animals - shannietron
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525001617301107
======
Animats
Back in 2011, there was an announcement from MIT about a new approach to a
broad-spectrum antiviral that appeared to work.[1] This goes way beyond an
AIDS-specific cure. But it was at MIT Lincoln Labs, which doesn't usually do
bio. So the researcher moved to Draper Labs, but didn't get much funding. Then
that funding ran out. Now the guy behind this is trying to get funding on
Indiegogo.[3] The problem seems to be that it's too far along for small-scale
YC-sized funding, but not far enough along to sell to Big Pharma. The guy
behind it clearly doesn't know how to get funded. He has a web site [4] and
keeps trying for crowd funding.

Some VC needs to talk to this guy. This might or might not work, but the
upside is good and the costs aren't that high.

[1]
[https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html](https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html)
[2] [http://www.businessinsider.com/todd-rider-draco-
crowdfunding...](http://www.businessinsider.com/todd-rider-draco-crowdfunding-
broad-spectrum-antiviral-2015-12) [3]
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dracos-may-be-
effective-a...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dracos-may-be-effective-
against-all-viruses#/) [4]
[https://riderinstitute.org/](https://riderinstitute.org/)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Given billionaires running their own space programs it makes me wonder why
there aren't more billionaires running biologic research companies. Between
life extension and immunity to (or protection from) really pathological
conditions it seems like their interests would be aligned with folks like
this.

~~~
Teknoman117
I almost wonder if running your own space program is cheaper. As in the amount
of regulatory BS you have to go through due to the monopolistic behavior of
the large pharmaceutical companies...

~~~
ChuckMcM
And yet, if you're not really planning on selling the techniques you find on
the open market could you save yourself a lot of time by ignoring the FDA?

~~~
db48x
You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars before you even get to the point
where you can ask the FDA if you can start human trials. Even having spent all
that time and money, you still won't have any guarantee that your drug will
prove to be safe, effective, or better than any existing drugs.

~~~
JabavuAdams
> You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars before you even get to the
> point where you can ask the FDA if you can start human trials.

What's a rough breakdown of costs? Salaries certainly don't seem to be the
dominant factor. Is it lab equipment & facilities?

~~~
db48x
I'm not a chemist, but here's how I understand it to work.

It's all trial and error. You start with some model about how your target
disease works. Perhaps, for the sake of argument, your model is that disease Q
is caused by a deficit of protein N. Protein N is broken down by enzyme F, so
obviously if you found a drug that suppressed enzyme F, you could cure disease
Q. Now all you have to do is try every chemical you know how to make to see if
it reacts with enzyme F.

Of course, you have to be a little more picky than that. Elemental Flourine
would probably react with the enzyme, but might react with other important
parts of the patient's anatomy as well; probably there would be side effects.
So you screen millions of compounds against your enzyme, and against thousands
of other molecules commonly found in the human body that you _don't_ want it
to interact with, looking for the one that interacts with as few of them as
possible. These days this part is somewhat automated. Machines can squirt
thousands of chemicals into thousands of test cells every second, and
automatically check them for chemical reactions. There are apparently whole
companies that do nothing but this, on a contract basis. They maintain a
library of compounds to test against, you ship them a big bottle of your
enzyme F in solution, and they run all the tests for you. That takes a big
logistical problem off your plate, which is nice. Since this is all they do,
they can really specialize and increase their efficiency.

Now you've spent a couple of years on the project and identified a few dozen
likely candidates. The next step is to optimize them to improve their effect.
You're basically trying to guess what part of the molecule is most important
(hopefully backing that guess up with some data), then changing the less
important looking parts of the molecule to see what happens. Think of all the
different combinations of side groups you could add to it, or remove from it,
or swap out with other groups, etc, and try them all. Lots of synthesizing
small batches of chemicals nobody else has ever synthesized before,
determining their structures to make sure you synthesized what you set out to
synthesize, lots of assays to see what kind of reactions they get up to, lots
of failures.

After a few years of that and you might have something you can start testing
in a real biological system. For this step you use cell cultures, rather than
going immediately to the full complexity of an animal model. Your drug isn't
much good if the liver immediately thinks it's a poison and dismantles it, or
if it kills the cultured liver cells, etc.

If none of that goes wrong, then maybe you do tests in an animal model
(provided you can find some animals that are susceptible to disease Q, or
something close enough), and then later do human testing. Hopefully your
disease model was correct; not all of them are. Look at all the alzheimers
drugs that have failed, for instance. It seems that none of our hypotheses for
how alzheimers works are correct.

Also, don't forget that at some point you also have to work out how to
synthesize your drug efficiently, safely, inexpensively, and in large batches.

Labs are presumably a big part of the costs, but a lot of the cost of a lab is
the people, not just the equipment.

I think changing the way the FDA works is a hopeless cause, because the real
costs are at the beginning of the process. Fund basic research instead, so
that we can find new types of chemicals to build, new ways of building them,
new natural products, etc. Maybe someone will even crack the simulation
problem (the problem is that accurate chemical simulations take months and
years to run, and simulations that are faster than physical tests are
inaccurate).

~~~
JabavuAdams
Thanks, that's great.

------
rosalinekarr
For anyone unfamiliar with CRISPR, I strongly recommend this quick
introduction video from Kurzgesagt on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY)

~~~
DigitalJack
There is a great radiolab podcast on it as well.
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-
crispr/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/)

~~~
mino
I wanted to post the same thing. That episode of radiolab was great.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow, I had not connected the idea of using CRISPR genome editing with
targeting virus dna segments. If I understand the technique correctly (and I
am not a biologist for sure!) they used an adeno virus modified with a
specific Cas9 setup to elide HIV DNA from cells it infected (normally I
associate viruses with _adding_ DNA rather than removing it :-)

Is that even close to a correct interpretation? It sounds like the technique
could be used for pretty much any virus dna you wanted to target.

~~~
ithinkinstereo
Correct. You can also use CRISPR to edit a person's own cells in a lab for
injection back into the person's body to combat a slew of diseases, including
cancer.

China is already experimenting on live humans: [http://gizmodo.com/china-is-
racing-ahead-of-the-us-in-the-qu...](http://gizmodo.com/china-is-racing-ahead-
of-the-us-in-the-quest-to-cure-ca-1794749183)

~~~
freyir
AIDs, cancer, etc., is great, but what about male pattern baldness?

~~~
kupiakos
In all seriousness, what could happen for trans individuals? What would be the
actual effect of replacing all cells' XY's with XX's?

~~~
andygates
Female patient transitions to male, then gets male pattern baldness. /s

------
reasonattlm
It is worth noting that the real challenge in gene therapy at this time is not
editing the genes, but in getting sufficient coverage of edited cells (and
especially progenitors and stem cells) in an adult individual to achieve the
therapeutic goal and make it last.

(Most studies of genetic alterations in the broader sense have bypassed this
challenge by working with animal lineages, or animals in which the editing
happens in the earliest stages of development, when there are very few cells
needing to be changed. The alteration then propagates during embryonic and
later development).

There have been a number of very promising studies in the past year or two
with regard to gene therapies to apply to adults, such as animal studies that
demonstrated a cure for an inherited muscular dystrophy, but in the bigger
picture, comprehensive coverage of tissues and cells is still something that
the research community is in the midst of getting to grips with.

~~~
tridentjin
This might be the biggest issue with CRISPR right now. The other issue is that
we are not close to knowing what effect manipulating a single gene has on
other areas. Especially if this gene is a switch for multiple genes.

~~~
amelius
Scientists are constantly performing RNA-seq analyses to determine where any
given gene is active.

------
dgritsko
If (like me) you don't have a good working understanding of CRISPR, check out
this fantastic episode of Radiolab: [http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-
part-1-crispr/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-part-1-crispr/)

~~~
sluukkonen
There's also an updated version of the episode that they aired this year.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-
crispr/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/)

~~~
DigitalJack
Just to add some info: The update recaps the original, and talks about
advances over the year or two since the first one.

It's a great podcast episode.

~~~
mino
And if you like the original episode, I also strongly suggest you listen to
this:
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/shrink/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/shrink/)

It is not CRISPR-related, but part of the same interview. It was really
inspiring.

------
carbocation
Full article is available here (it will show some loading page but the PDF
should download immediately):
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Won_Bin_Young/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Won_Bin_Young/publication/315775073_In_Vivo_Excision_of_HIV-1_Provirus_by_saCas9_and_Multiplex_Single-
Guide_RNAs_in_Animal_Models/links/58e644dfaca2727858cc2d67/In-Vivo-Excision-
of-HIV-1-Provirus-by-saCas9-and-Multiplex-Single-Guide-RNAs-in-Animal-
Models.pdf)

~~~
nenreme
Everything is on sci-hub anyway.

------
mandude
Gene therapy (and CRISPR) is ultimately going to eliminate most if not every
ailment/issue/genetic problem that we have, including aging and eye problems.
Very thankful we are reaching the point where we can go into our cells and fix
ourselves.

~~~
tejtm
I do agree, but that is just the good news. In other news although we can
harbor optimistic thoughts for scientists, medical professionals, lawmakers
and maybe even politicians all around the globe to do the "right" thing to
preserve human life in a currently recognizable form, but there is not a force
on heaven or earth that is going to stop parents from trying to give their
children every advantage.

~~~
return0
> to do the "right" thing

"right" according to whom? nature itself doesn't believe that

~~~
mtempm
Despite academic/political/military/banking/corporate alignment against
fundamental morals, "right" appears to be in agreement with nature/natural
selection. The States had a more "right" society founded om constitutional and
civil rights that was a big part of its climb from an English colony to the
world power in less than 150 years after the constitution was written.

The reason people probably have strong convictions about right or wrong is
most likely _because_ of nature, not despite it. Groups that had this genetic
trait built tribes, societies that had greater success in the long term.

In the short term, individuals, or even groups of individuals, can be
successful by acting amorally, but this comes as a cost to their group's long
term success--the cancer analogy.

Right now there is limited competition between groups in the world. Most of
what we should be competing against is the coming extinction event when
something else out there gets a whiff of all the artificial elctromagnetic
radiation. Probably the reason we hear so little in the cosmos is because it
is not a very competitive strategy.

~~~
golergka
> academic/political/military/banking/corporate alignment against fundamental
> morals

"fundamental morals"? What are those and where the hell do you get them from?

> The reason people probably have strong convictions about right or wrong is
> most likely because of nature, not despite it. Groups that had this genetic
> trait built tribes, societies that had greater success in the long term.

Actually, couldn't agree more. But people do have _different_ convictions
about right or wrong.

~~~
mtempm
Re fundamental morals:

I would wager >95% of people agree on these. I've never met someone who didn't
have an understanding of fundamental morals, except for a few people whom I
consider to be a psychopaths.

I really would bet that most of us dont need an education to know that killing
children for pleasure is wrong and disgusting. However, we might be split on
whether spanking your children as punoshment is wrong. I think people
understand the difference.

~~~
golergka
> I really would bet that most of us dont need an education to know that
> killing children for pleasure is wrong and disgusting.

Can I remind you that abortion is legal and funded by the state in most of the
first world?

It's not that I have a personal opinion on the matter (I find it too complex
to develop a definite opinion), but it does come pretty close to what you're
describing.

~~~
mtempm
It's not. An egg moments After fertilization experiencing suffering requires
quite a bit of inagination, while we all can agree a child can suffer. Where
we draw the line between that is obviously somewhat up for debate (and no one
in their right mind is saying we should kill born babies for pleasure).

~~~
golergka
You seem to be using subjective experiences and the ability to experience them
as base for your moral system. Is it the case? Why?

~~~
mtempm
I dont believe for a second that let's say you did something you knew to be
evil, such as kill a child for convenience, and were hypothetically asked
about this in an after life: "why did you do it, you knew it was evil," that
you'd be able to say honestly that you didn't actually know that.

As far as I am aware anything is possible, but suffering and happiness seem to
be real.

------
Sephr
Just a reminder that MPEG LA has a CRISPR patent pool[1] and is willing to
enforce it. It almost feels like satire.

[1]
[http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/CRISPR/default.aspx](http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/CRISPR/default.aspx)

------
turbohedgehog
Last time I read about CRISPR used to remove HIV from infected cells, the
virus mutated to defeat the CRISPR attack - could this happen here?

~~~
kbenson
Isn't the only way to mutate to avoid CRISPR to change your genes enough that
CRISPR can't identify you? If so, doesn't that mean we just find the new
genetic signature and generate a variation that targets it?

I see CRISPR as grepping through memory for running instruction code. Sure,
the code can change, but if you see the behavior, then it's a matter of
finding the new code signature manually and generating a new CRISPR variant
target it. If that's accurate, the similarities to anti-malware are pretty
cool. Just keep updating your virus DB.

~~~
jfarlow
Well, as CRISPR was originally found as a kind of immune system, there do
exist a number of anti-anti-Cas9 systems against that evolved alongside it.
There are a number of small inhibitors of Cas9 [1] (which themselves could be
used to tune Cas9 in therapeutics). However up-taking such a defense is
admittedly an unlike route for a virus like HIV to take to evolve resistance
to a CRISPR-based therapy.

More practically, HIV has such a high mutation rate, that it's likely very
difficult to target every HIV sequence with a sequence-specific Cas9 therapy.
If the Cas9 guide sequence is too generic it'll take out stuff besides HIV
(stuff you need). And if the guide sequence is too specific it won't get all
the viral inserts because many are degenerate. As with all things though, 95%
success with viral excision via CRISPR, in conjunction with 95% success via
immunotherapy [2], and 95% from standard anti-retrovirals [3], get's you
pretty good 99.9999% coverage.

That's the power of convergent technologies. It's an interesting slice through
a number of modern therapeutic technologies all applied to one of the most
challenging of tailored foes. You see convergence of small molecule
biochemistry along with immunotherapy, along gene therapy, along with cutting
edge synthetic biology - all approaching the problem from different angles.

[1] www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31683-X

[2]
[https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/ecd4ig/](https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/ecd4ig/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Antiretroviral_drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Antiretroviral_drugs)

~~~
Turing_Machine
"More practically, HIV has such a high mutation rate, that it's likely very
difficult to target every HIV sequence with a sequence-specific Cas9 therapy.
If the Cas9 guide sequence is too generic it'll take out stuff besides HIV
(stuff you need). "

Unless I'm grossly misunderstanding how CRISPR works, there's no conceptual
reason why you couldn't target multiple sequences _at the same time_ , with a
cocktail method. That is, rather than trying a single overly broad match, you
could go for (say) ten highly-specific targets at the same time. A particular
HIV virion would then have to differ in _all ten_ regions to avoid getting
chopped up.

Just spitballing here:

Google tells me that HIV has a mutation rate of about 4E-3 per base.

Let's say you choose target sequences ten bases long (I don't know what the
maximum practical length for the technology is, nor the minimum length you'd
need to reliably tell HIV from human, and Google isn't any immediate help
there).

The probability that there will be a mutation in that sequence is then about
0.04. However, if you target ten sequences simultaneously, the probability
that all ten would be mutated is (0.04)^10 ~= 1e-14.

That's likely more than good enough to assure that there weren't any resistant
mutants around (if by some chance there are...lather, rinse, repeat).

This is hand-waving, to be sure. If you have better numbers, plug them in.

Edit: fixed fat-fingering the calculator.

~~~
new299
I think ∼3E−5 per base per replication. Might be a more useful number [1].

If you use 10mers, that only gives you 1048576. I'd be almost certain that
>90% of those sequences also exist in the human genome. So your target isn't
specific enough (take out stuff you need as the parent suggested).

So you need to use a longer sequence, perhaps 25bp. Maybe there's a stable
region or set of regions you can target (in which case the high overall
mutation rate doesn't matter). Or a cocktail of sequences, specific to the
global HIV population (I doubt this, HIV mutates more in a single individual
than Flu does in the global population).

But if not, then you first need to figure out what the viral population in
this individual looks like. So you sequence a subset of population, and come
up with a 25mer or set of 25mers that target this population.

That might be a lot of sequences (significant problem). Which you then need to
get synthesized (will take weeks).

Now. It's taken days to run your sequencing experiment, and weeks to get your
CRISPR stuff synthesized. In this time the viral population has been
generating 10E11 new virions per day. You're population has moved on, and
almost certainly contains members which don't have your previous cocktail of
25mers in them and will survive the treatment.

Because HIV mutates so much, there was some interesting work I saw a while
back on guiding the evolution of the population. You'd use drugs which don't
wipe out the infection, but push the population toward specific genotypes.
Specifically those which you have good treatments for, in the hope that you
can wipe out most of the population at once.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3530041/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3530041/)

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Maybe there's a stable region or set of regions you can target (in which case
the high overall mutation rate doesn't matter). Or a cocktail of sequences,
specific to the global HIV population (I doubt this, HIV mutates more in a
single individual than Flu does in the global population)."

Hmm... I would bet that there _is_ a cocktail of sequences such that if they
are not conserved, the virus effectively becomes no longer HIV (no longer
infectious, no longer capable of producing symptoms...).

HIV is obviously not a human being, right? Find every sequence where it
differs, target them all. :-)

~~~
new299
I did a quick literature search, but couldn't find anything. It should be easy
to answer that question.

There appears to be at least one conserved protein. However there's a lot of
scope for different underlying sequences due to synonymous codons.

Depending on how long a fragment you need to target, that could end up being a
lot of sequences, and unpractical.

~~~
new299
It's also possible that HIV could stick introns into the sequence too to avoid
CRISPR...

------
brut
From the abstract:

    
    
        Intravenously injected quadruplex sgRNAs/saCas9 AAV-DJ/8
        excised HIV-1 proviral DNA and significantly reduced
        viral RNA expression in several organs/tissues of Tg26
        mice. In EcoHIV acutely infected mice, intravenously
        injected quadruplex sgRNAs/saCas9 AAV-DJ/8 reduced
        systemic EcoHIV infection, as determined by live
        bioluminescence imaging.
    

Can a mod change the title to reflect the findings? The original title is "In
Vivo Excision of HIV-1 Provirus by saCas9 and Multiplex Single-Guide RNAs in
Animal Models" and should be kept. That way maybe some people wouldn't just
reflex-upvote and actually at least read the abstract...

~~~
JCzynski
That abstract looks completely consistent with the submitted title. I don't
see any reason to change it.

~~~
alevskaya
"Eliminates" is a very loaded term in viral therapy. This paper doesn't show
elimination of virus, it shows that the integrated viral genome can be excised
in -some- cells by administration of adeno-associated virus harboring the
CRISPR system.

------
BubbasDad
In 2013 a very highly-placed Goldman Sachs exec, a friend of a friend, told me
his AMFAR contacts predicted a 'genetics-based cure' in a 3-4 years instead of
the 10 years they publicly projected. The rationale was donations would stop
if people knew how close they were to a cure.

~~~
grawlinson
Even if AIDS is defeated, there's always other medical maladies that affect
people. MRSA, for one.

~~~
iDemonix
That's not really the attitude towards curing disease.

~~~
curiousgal
It's not towards anything in life.

------
iplaw
This, coupled with immunotherapy which boosts efficacy of our own defense
mechanisms - for example, NK cell doping via LY49D/DAP12 - is quite exciting.

As someone else noted, THIS is what CRISPR was evolved to do. It was a DNA-
based immune system used by bacteria to explicitly identify an invading virus
via DNA, and to store a record of previously unknown virus for future
reference. And, it was intended to function continually, in a living organism.

------
peter303
Craig Venter, the first genome sequenced and first promoter of shotgun
sequencing, disses CRISPR. He claims its not reliable enough. Nor can you
prevent from altering unexpected parts of the genome. I dont know how much is
not-invented-here and how accurate he is.

------
mrcactu5
how did they refine crispr? Around this time last year we had

HIV overcomes CRISPR gene-editing attack
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453737)

------
kumarski
Genomic responses in animal models do not mimic themselves in humans.

Great example is thalidiomide.

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-drugs-that-
showed...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-drugs-that-showed-
promising-results-in-clinical-lab-animal-trials-and-failed-miserably-in-human-
trials)

[https://walkerma.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/animal-
models/](https://walkerma.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/animal-models/)

I advise extreme caution and context on hyping this. Derek Lowe wrote a great
post on this a few years ago that I still reference whenever I see HIV animal
claims.

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/03/a_m...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/03/a_modest_literature_proposal)

~~~
arcticfox
You post the classic cautionary comment but reviewing your sources, none of
them at all seem relevant:

"Genomic responses in animal models do not mimic themselves in humans" \-
source? Thalidomide is just a random example of a traditional non-genetic
treatment. Specifically the CRISPR mechanism clearly has no precedent of
failure, as the Chinese only recently began human trials. There's no precedent
of success, but there seems to be no reason to believe it won't work, since it
works fine in vivo in other mammals.

And the Lowe link you provided is complaining about in vitro testing; this was
in vivo. As far as I can tell, it's exactly what he suggests needs to be done
before there's any hype.

If your point is simply that many things have been tried and failed in the
past, sure, that's common knowledge. But CRISPR is not a similar approach,
there is very little precedent, so IMO optimism is just as warranted as
"extreme caution".

------
natch
"animal models" is obviously a term of art but what does it mean in plain
English?

~~~
timdorr
It's any animal (mice, in this case) with a set of characteristics you keep
constant between trials. It could be mice of the same age or weight or that
have a specific gene or have the same diet.

~~~
jtmcmc
There are specific 'model animals' that the scientific community uses however
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_model_organisms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_model_organisms)

------
diego_moita
Wow!

If this could be used to fight bacteria resistant to antibiotics then it is
the start of something fantastic.

If it can be used to fight also diseases in animals (e.g.: foot & mouth
disease in cattle) or plants (e.g.: citrus cancer) then it is even bigger.

------
jjtheblunt
That title is false : the article states viral load was reduced.

------
andrewchambers
Is there any aggregated stream of information giving you information of
vaccines and cures as they come in?

------
rhodrid
CRISPR sounds extremely powerful. Like turning all blue eyes brown powerful.

------
alistproducer2
As exciting as this is, we already know how people have used the decreased
danger of HIV infection to become careless about other types of STIs. Given
that our antibiotics are losing their ability to treat many common STIs, an
HIV cure without some advancement in antibiotics will be swapping one epidemic
for a series of others.

Edit: I wanted to add a couple sources for my claims above. Once people
stopped believing raw sex was an existential threat they started going nuts,
falsely believing that everything else can just be cleared up with a pill. Let
me also say that my SO worked on the front lines of public health for almost a
decade so I might have a unique perspective on this issue because of what she
experienced as part of her job.

[http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/01/health/syphilis-newborns-
partn...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/01/health/syphilis-newborns-partner/)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/std-rates-in-the-us-
rise...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/std-rates-in-the-us-
rise_us_5807bcf6e4b0b994d4c36002)

[http://www.ocregister.com/2017/01/26/syphilis-
up-412-gonorrh...](http://www.ocregister.com/2017/01/26/syphilis-
up-412-gonorrhea-204-why-are-orange-county-std-rates-through-the-roof/)

~~~
api
Only if we fail to educate people about the dangers of _other_ STIs.

~~~
lohengramm
Which is happening...

I would say the excessive mediatic exposure of HIV have definitely worked to
supress awareness and care for other STIs.

For instance, I am HPV+ and didn't have a clue about the existance of such a
thing before getting it.

~~~
abalashov
I agree. By the numbers, most STIs aren't dramatic or fatal in the way HIV is,
but rather "annoying little infections", though they can still affect the
quality of the rest of one's life in a profoundly negative way. But they don't
get much press.

------
hndamien
Maybe Charlie Sheen would fund it?

------
revelation
CRISPR mediated genome editing does, CRISPR itself is not a magic HIV drug.
That should probably be in the editorialized title.

~~~
superbatfish
If one is familiar with the term 'CRISPR' in the first place, then the
intended meaning is pretty clear.

------
ShannonAlther
It's awesome that this is possible. Right now HIV infections are basically a
minor nuisance, provided you're taking the appropriate medication, but this
bodes well for future treatment of viral infections.

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skj
> Right now HIV infections are basically a minor nuisance, provided you're
> taking the appropriate medication

Even with your caveat, the fact that more than 1 million people died from HIV
in 2015 is probably a good signal to not use the term "minor nuisance".

[https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html](https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html)

~~~
ShannonAlther
People who don't have access to truvada definitely aren't going to be getting
cutting-edge gene therapy any time soon. And how many people died of type I
diabetes in 2015?

~~~
skj
That's another condition I'd probably not call a "minor nuicance".

