Breakthrough in Gene Therapy for HIV

I’m a big fan of the economist. I believe it is one of the few sources of unadulterated news that Americans can get now with major media being controlled and censored by the elite in our country. The economist not only has great news stories about stuff going on around the world, it also has a great section on science. Today, I’d like to reflect on an article that caught my eye. It’s about gene therapy and the fight against HIV.

I’m excited with this recent breakthrough in gene therapy that makes new cells resistant to the virus. The vaccine-like break-through is even more impressive because they tested on patients whose bodies already stopped accepting current medications so they have highly resistant strains of HIV.

Immediately after reading this article I realized the ground-breaking implications on its affect on society. So much money is being thrown at the problem of HIV (The Gates Foundation has been doing a lot of work in this area) and although I disagree that it is a top priority in the world, I’m glad this may be solved so funding can be diverted to better purpose. The average American consumes 24 acres of resources on this planet and at this moment 1/17/2007 there is only approximately 4.5 acres of resources per person if you divide available space on our planet by the people. Our population is growing steadily as well. Some diseases might be necessary to curb population growth so using so many resources to stop a disease may not be the most efficient use of our global resources. If we bring the standard of living of everyone in the world up to that of an average American’s, we need 5 planets; the sad part of about that fact is that it doesn’t include space for animals. If we want animals we need at least 7 earth-quality planets to accommodate sustainable human living.

That’s why I’ve dedicated my life to building a corporation that will practice CSR and be a good global citizen. With the resources and best practices gained, I hope to be able to spread these teachings to other companies to help achieve environmental goals. I will personally use all the resources I gain from the corporation to R&D and projects to help make our environment more sustainable.

Let’s go back to the article since I got a little side-tracked. VIRXSYS is the company and sadly it’s private. I would’ve done more research and probably invested in the company if all the scientific breakthroughs are true. I need more financial resources if I’m ever to start a company. If anyone has information on the timeline of their project and the stages of testing they’re in, please inform me. We need to keep track of scientific breakthroughs like these and hopefully apply the new gene therapy techniques to other diseases. Humanity spends a lot of resources on combating disease, if we are more efficient at this, we can divert some of these resources into saving our dying planet.

XXX

The Economist
November 11th-17th
Science and technology

p.90

The fighter within
NEW YORK

Gene therapy shows some early promise
ONE of the most fashionable treatments for disease, gene therapy, has so far made little headway in tackling one of the most modish of illnesses, AIDS and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it. The idea of gene-therapy treatment for HIV/AIDS would be to create a gene that, when placed in an infected person, would make all of the offspring of the cell into which it was inserted resistant to the virus. Even if the virus continued to destroy the patient's immune cells, new ones that could not be infected would replace them. Eventually, the disease would no longer threaten the health of the patient.
A first step towards this has been achieved by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and VIRXSYS, a biotechnology firm based near Baltimore. Rather than inserting a gene directly, they removed the immune cells form the people and replace d them with versions that had been modified to resist the virus. The results were published in this weeks’ issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team treated five infected patients who had not responded to at least two different programmes of treatment using conventional anti-retroviral drugs. They removed from each patient’s blood the cells called “helper T-cells” that would normally mobilise the immune response to the virus. These were purified and stuffed with a form of HIV that had been altered to carry a mirror image of “antisense” version of molecule that enables it to multiply. This genetic fiddling disrupted the reproduction of the virus inside infected cells.
Such a small experiment was designed merely to establish whether the approach was safe. But the researchers were pleasantly surprised to find that the number of viruses in each patient dropped. This suggests that the treatment was tackling the disease effectively in difficult patients for whom conventional drugs had failed. According to Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania, their immune systems responded “as if they were on a vaccine” and it appeared as though their bodies were “vaccinating themselves” against HIV.
The researchers are now moving to the next phase of study which will involve more patients, including those whose disease is in tits early stages. If later trials confirm the early positive results, this approach could prove a useful complement to existing drugs or a future vaccine-and may even replace them.