Scientists and doctors "cure" HIV

steddyeddy

Great news and fantastic work from all involved

Scientists have managed to repeat one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the last few years.

Almost exactly one year ago, Johns Hopkins researchers made national headlines when they announced that they’ve vanquished the AIDS-causing virus from a child born to an HIV-positive mother in Mississippi. They began antiretroival treatment before the baby was 30 hours old. She’s now 3.5 years old and still virus-free, even without treatment in the last two years. Researchers have puzzled over how it happened, and many remain skeptical. The child was only the second person ever to be “cured” of HIV; the first was an adult through a stem-cell transplant. Since it’s difficult to prove that the body has been completely cleared of HIV, Nature explains, being “functionally cured” means the virus is effectively controlled and the immune system stays healthy without treatment.

Just yesterday, doctors announced that they have cleared the virus from a second baby infected with HIV. This girl was born in Los Angeles last April to a mother with advanced AIDS who had not been taking her medication. With aggressive treatment beginning just four hours after her birth, the virus was undetectable within 11 days, the New York Times reports.

Doctors don’t normally use these sorts of aggressive treatments until they’re sure the baby is infected, and then sometimes not in the first weeks, NY Times explains. “Of course I had worries,” says Audra Deveikis from Miller Children’s Hospital. “But the mother’s disease was not under control, and I had to weigh the risk of transmission against the toxicity of the meds.”

Johns Hopkins’ Deborah Persaud, who led the ultrasensitive testing on both children, says that the Los Angeles baby's signs are different from what doctors see in patients whose infections are merely suppressed by successful treatment. Even though tests suggest the child (now nine months old) has completely cleared the virus, she’s still receiving a 3-drug cocktail -- so using the words “cured” or even “in remission” is wrong, Persaud says.

"Really the only way we can prove that we have accomplished remission in these kids is by taking them off treatment,” Persaud adds, “and that's not without risk.” There might be five more cases of “cured” children in Canada and three in South Africa.

Most HIV-infected moms in the U.S. get medication during pregnancy to cut down the chances of passing the virus on to their babies. A clinical trial scheduled to begin in a couple months will put 60 babies, who are born infected, on drugs within their first two days. “The clinical trial that we’re about to start has specific criteria to stop therapy and to restart it if the virus comes back," says Yvonne Bryson of Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA, who consulted on the Los Angeles baby's care. Results from the trial will help doctors decide when to remove her from treatment.

The findings were announced at the Conference On Retroviruses And Opportunistic Infections in Boston this week.
- See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/doctors-have-cleared-second-baby-hiv#sthash.0yJA7VNM.dpuf

Agent Bubbles

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/aids-cure?nopaging=1

^^^That's a great simple little read on where things stand at the minute.

Jumboman

Would anyone here like to comment on this video ?

Vorsprung

What's your take on it?

partyatmygaff

Jumboman wrote: »

Would anyone here like to comment on this video ?

What's there to say?

A man with a revoked medical license talking BS and putting on a show to garner attention.

It's not worthy of any further comment.

Jumboman

Vorsprung wrote: »

What's your take on it?

I would like to give my opinion on what really causes aids but I think it will be censored.

Taco Chips

Go ahead and say what you want to say. And don't go running behind "the man will censor me". Are you going to contribute to scientific discussion or make innuendo and post links to rubbish videos with no basis in fact?

MagicMarker

Jumboman wrote: »

I would like to give my opinion on what really causes aids but I think it will be censored.

Aliens?

Uriel.

I'd hardly call it a cure as such, surely it would be considered more of a potentially preventative measure for a very specific category of people, E.g. Newborns of infected mothers..

Rucking_Fetard

steddyeddy wrote: »

Great news and fantastic work from all involved

Functionally Cured no more. Poor thing.

And if they've learned anything, it's that they haven't a clue.

Rucking_Fetard

Celgene's Istodax shown to reactivate dormant HIV: study

Study data presented Tuesday at the International AIDS Conference indicate that Celgene's cancer therapy Istodax (romidepsin) can reactivate dormant HIV in infected patients. "We have now shown that we can activate a hibernating virus with [Istodax] and that the activated virus moves into the bloodstream in large amounts," commented study author Ole Schmeltz Sogaard.

The researchers found that infusion with the drug boosted HIV production in infected cells by between 2.1 and 3.9 fold, allowing the virus to be detected in the bloodstream of five patients. The scientists cautioned that the virus returned to undetectable levels seven days after treatment.

the researchers have no way of knowing how much of the latent virus was flushed out by the drug. However, the researchers noted that the immune systems of the patients did not appear to attack the reactivated virus, as no difference in the number of infected cells was observed after each treatment with Istodax. "This suggests when you do this reactivation, you also need to also target and activate the immune system and teach it to recognise these cells and attack,"

Shares of Bionor Pharma, which is studying Istodax as part of a "kick-and-kill" approach in combination with the experimental vaccine Vacc-4x, rose as much as 13 percent on the news.

Nothing really surprising here. Give people with HIV a chemo drug and watch their levels jump.




Temple Researchers Edit HIV Out of Human Cells in Lab Study

researchers from Temple’s neuroscience department have figured out a way to edit human cells and “snip out” HIV DNA, essentially eliminating the virus from cells for good.

The press release reads like a sci-fi novel. Listen:

When deployed, a combination of a DNA-snipping enzyme called a nuclease and a targeting strand of RNA called a guide RNA (gRNA) hunt down the viral genome and excise the HIV-1 DNA. From there, the cell's gene repair machinery takes over, soldering the loose ends of the genome back together – resulting in virus-free cells.

The research, of course, still has a ways to go. For one thing, while the method has proven formidable at snipping out latent HIV virus from some human cells, it hasn't been quite as effective at delivering the one-two punch to all cells infected with the virus; they're working to come up with a therapeutic delivery system that would do exactly that. Another challenge: HIV-1 is prone to mutations, so they'd need to figure out a way to tailor the treatment to individual patients' needs.

Rucking_Fetard

How did the 'Berlin patient' rid himself of HIV?

Rucking_Fetard

Aids: Origin of pandemic 'was 1920s Kinshasa'

laklaker

Cure is soon. Maybe this 2016 since the national budget of the america will be increase.