From the article, "Animal trials of the protein are due to start this year, with any treatment using it likely to be some years away." Well, I'm glad that got mentioned. Most of the article looks like a minimal rewrite of a press release. It is way too early for this to be on the front page of HN as "news," as there is nothing but speculation here so far. Over the years, I have seen a lot of press releases about this or that "cure" appear on the front page of HN, but a few years later, it is discovered that there is neither safety nor effectiveness in actual human clinical use of the proposed cure. Let's check in on this again after there have been human clinical trials that have progressed to actual pre-marketing studies of the treatment.
Maybe instead of taking two years, it will take four, or eight. Would you be surprised if it took ten to sixteen?
But then again 64 years might be just about right. How long ago was it again when we were all supposed to be driving flying cars? I remember in 1992 reading about "holographic credit card-sized storage" cards that were heading to market in "just a couple of years".
Engineers, biologists, and others seeking funding often way underestimate how long things take.
I don't think anyone feels that gene therapy delivery mechanisms are going to be plug and play. Until we master the technology, I'm sure that each attempt at gene therapy will be specifically geared to solving a single genetic problem.
It's like in software development. Often introduction of new complexities doesn't create a linear amount of work to write and maintain it. Depending upon the coupling of the complexity, the extra effort could be multiplicative or exponential.
Seriously, how long have we been hearing about "cures for AIDS". A couple of decades? Now, this particular vapor cure has an extra dependency upon an unspecified gene therapy. It's naive to think that an actual cure based upon this research isn't much further away than the article hints at.
There isn't any reason anyone should spend much time listening to what I have to say about it, but I would expect gene therapy delivery to be increasingly plug and play. My reasoning being, the safety issues are concentrated around transmission so insertion strategies that have a robust story there will be copied. Especially if they are effective. Also, the 'obvious' gene therapy targets tend to be similar mechanisms (approximately because they are available at the level of understanding we have right now).
I don't actually expect this to be available as a treatment any time soon, but I think confident pessimism is probably at least as naive as confident optimism (simply because estimating what is possible is so hard).
this is never going to happen.... its too fucking profitable to have someone pulling 40,000 dollars of medications for 40 years, that is largely government subsidized vs. a one time 10,000 dollar fix. i mean yall realize how outstandingly different those two numbers are right? 40,000 * 40 = 1.6 million dollars in government subsidized money PER person... vs 10,000.... the former is literally 16 times more profitable... no way these industries back off that business model. ( i realize im just guessing at what a one time gene therapy fix would have to reasonably cost, but you could double it or triple it, quintuple it and its still significantly less profitable than the former. )
By that conspiracy theory logic, I'd expect that no pharmaceutical company has ever done a clinical trial on a gene therapy based cure for a disease. But in reality... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy
It's not. That's because gene therapy is really difficult. The fact that they're doing clinical trials at all does mean that they're spending a huge amount of resources on it, though, as it's not easy to get to that stage.
C'mon, his handle is "conspiracynutt". I think it's probably his job to swear that there's a drug company conspiracy that aims to prevent finding the cure for any disease that they can profit from instead.
Who is getting the 1.6 million vs the 10 thousand? If you could steal revenue from a rival it might be worth it. Also as the patents on your 40K a year income steam expire this 10K a head solution comes on line to double dip and make the generics worthless.
The protein these guys are 'mutating' is Tat or 'Trans-Activator of Transcription' [0], required in the HIV life-cycle for expression of viral proteins in the infected cells, formation of new viruses and subsequent infection of more cells. So, basically, they create (mutated) HIV with this protein that then interferes/competes with 'healthy' ('wild-type' in semi-correct biologist-speak) HIV in the infected 'patient'. Sounds simple, way more complex in practice, highly improbable to pull-off as an actual therapy.
(Don't want to bore the majority non-biologist HN audience with more details. But if HN'ers are interested I'll write more. :-)
My take on this story (always a good idea for spectacular claims) is to take it with more than a grain of salt. In HN-speak, this is not even a MVP, yet.
I'm not very familiar with viral mediated gene therapy, is it reasonable to assume that it would be possible to infect enough T-cells with the virus to overlap a significant portion of the HIV infected cells? And if so, is that achieved by having the viral vector spread rapidly as well? Wouldn't that be nearly as damaging as the HIV infection to start with? Or is the goal to try to introduce entire modified HIV genomes into cells and then have those be fortuitously replicated and bound into HIV particles which will hopefully go out and re-infect other T-cells and in the process inhibit the HIV production rate?
HIV, being a retrovirus, acts by inserting its genome into the infected cell's nuclear DNA. The infected cell is unable to distinguish it from its own 'native' DNA. This is a fundamental aspect of how the cellular machinery is hijacked by the virus to replicate itself.
Now, nearly a tenth of the human genome is made up of retroviruses (ERVs) that got inserted into our genome over the course of our species' (rather short) evolutionary history [0]. These ERVs were rendered dormant by genomic silencing of entire swaths of the genome (by mechanisms too detailed to go into here) turning them into 'harmless', silent blocks of genetic code we now carry in every cell!
is it reasonable to assume that it would be possible to infect enough T-cells with the virus to overlap a significant portion of the HIV infected cells?
That is the basic assumption, but is not guaranteed to happen. Specifically because a sub-population of infected T-cells, called the 'reservoir' population, are 'sleeping' in the bone marrow or the brain (and numerous other organs), waiting for signals from the immune system to activate them into action, which may happen due to an unrelated infection (or other reasons). This sub-population of cells, once called into action, will start running their usual gene expression program, resulting in the production of new viruses and infection of new cells. This is the NP-hard problem of HIV therapies!
Or is the goal to try to introduce entire modified HIV genomes into cells and then have those be fortuitously replicated and bound into HIV particles which will hopefully go out and re-infect other T-cells and in the process inhibit the HIV production rate?
In a word, yes. But there are too many moving parts to have the whole shebang fly off the handle and cause unintended or unexpected actions. Gene therapy, in its current form, has its place in the pantheon of medicine, but HIV is probably not a very good problem to attack with this approach, partly for reasons I mentioned above. The future of gene therapy holds the definite promises of miracle cures, which will be possible after more research and development (but only made possible by your tax dollars) ...
FYI, QIMR is a government-funded research facility for medical research and is incredibly well-respected here. They have a major cancer research facility attached to one of the best hospitals here. QIMR (with the University of Queensland - another big medical research entity here) also perform their own phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials.
In short, these guys are a juggernaut of medical research here and it's entirely possible that this will see tangible results in the middle-future.
As a non-scientist can someone explain how this would be delivered? How do you do gene therapy on a virus already in people? I guess more ignorantly, how does one deploy the cure to all of the HIV cells in the body in order to modify them?
I was going to shoot off "with a retrovirus", but then I thought I'd wikipedia it. Glad I did. Looks like the non-viral delivery methods are improving.
nullbasic? honestly sounds like bullshit... im starting to think that all of this AIDS "research" is bullshit. theres too many declarations of cures.... also where are all the people with AIDS in the developed world... if this is a huge epidemic and millions of people remain untested... then there should be a huge amount of people getting the weird AIDS illnesses they did in the 80s (an untested person should progress to AIDS... this is not happening with any regular occurrence)... condoms, treatment, or not... there should be lots of AIDS patients. especially if millions of people are dying. I've been to African slums. i don't see that. something is super fishy with this industry.
