Hiv gene therapy.....?

Question

Anyone know how the new straytegy for treating hiv, via gene therapy is coming along? Or any novel "star wars" approach to the disease is coming along?

Answer 1

Manipulating the body's cells and genes to treat disease holds great potential, but it is a field of research in its infancy. It will likely not yield results for years or perhaps decades as it takes baby steps towards progress.

Your immune system includes many parts: thymus, lymph nodes, bone marrow, etc. The cells in your body are made from cells found in your bone marrow. One special cell found in bone marrow, called a stem cell, is sometimes called the mother of all cells. If your immune system is intact and working well, then a single stem cell could divide and populate the full range of cells in your body.
Imagine there's a gene that makes a cell resistant to HIV infection. In theory, if that gene was inserted into a stem cell, all of the offspring of that cell would carry the gene and be resistant to HIV infection.

Again, in theory, as HIV destroys a person's CD4+ and other immune cells, the new cells resistant to HIV would replace them and thrive. Eventually these newer cells would take over and HIV could no longer weaken the immune system. Although a person may still have HIV, it could do no harm. The HIV may just die out because there are no cells for it to infect; or, it might persist but couldn't harm the immune system to any great degree.

The success of using gene therapy to treat HIV rests on some important assumptions. The first is that all parts of the immune system must be intact in order to support the stem cells in repopulating the system. However, some researchers suspect that HIV may damage the thymus. So, at some point in a person's HIV disease the thymus may not help develop new healthy CD4+ cells. Other therapies may need to be used to improve or enhance damaged immune environments (such as the thymus or bone marrow) in order for gene therapy to be successful.

hope this helps u..