HIV cure a success, but won’t work for everyone
Does one man’s apparent recovery from HIV herald the dawn of a cure for the disease?
The internet is abuzz with press reports claiming that a new cure for HIV is on the horizon. This flurry began last week with a paper in the journal Blood, followed by an interview with the patient himself in the German magazine Stern, and has since spread around the web like wildfire, including reports in CNN and Associated Press.
The research itself isn’t new - the paper in Blood is a follow-up analysis of a treatment performed in 2007 and first published in 2008.
The trial involved Timothy Ray Brown, an AIDS sufferer who had developed myeloid leukemia (a cancer of the immune system). Brown’s doctors, Gero Hütter and his colleagues at the Charité University of Medicine, Berlin, treated him with heavy doses of chemotherapy to suppress the cancer. They then followed this with a bone marrow transplant containing stem cells from a matched donor - a routine treatment for this sort of cancer.
However, crucially, the stem cells had an extra potency. Hütter knew that about 1 per cent of Europeans have a natural resistance to HIV conferred by a mutation in a gene called CCR5, so he searched for a donor from within this population.
The transplant was a success and the donor’s immunity seems to have been passed to Brown via the transplant. All this was known in 2008.
In their latest paper in Blood, the researchers confirmed that Brown seems to have maintained his resistance to HIV for three years, confounding their expectation that he would become reinfected. They concluded that a “cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.”
Note the crucial words “in this patient”. For the transplant to succeed, the bone marrow had to be specifically matched to Brown so that his immune system would not reject them. He was lucky that a match was found. Furtherore, as Michael Saag, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham AIDS Center, told CNN, Brown had to have his own immune system practically wiped out to avoid a rejection of the transplant, a risky procedure in itself.
Though some press reports have suggested this could herald a treatment for AIDS, in reality this is unlikely to be the case. As New Scientist pointed out in a thorough analysis of the trial at the time, while being fantastic news for Brown, for all the above reasons and more, it is still a far cry from a treatment that can scale to the millions of AIDS sufferers worldwide. [via.]
I myself, also posted the article citing this guy’s recovery here. Kinda sad there’s a big exception to what it could mean for other people—still, I suppose it’s progress.
Shi Yuan has created a way to turn normally passive things into something with a life of its own. Like this wallpaper that reacts to heat, the painting that react when you touch it, or the daily calendar that fades away during the day. It is made using heat sensitive paint - and it is incredible. [via.]
David Foster Wallace
To the lovely Capricorn (who poured her heart out to me),
Send me your email—H&H is no place for me to write all that I want to for you.
Sincerely,
N.
British artist Keira Rathbone uses typewriters, instead of brushes and pencils, to create amazing portraits and drawings. Check out her website here.
Hey, why do you like movies Natasha?
“Well, I think this video sums it up rather nicely”.
Patient Cured of HIV with Stem Cell Transplant
Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.
The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.
The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.
They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”
Continue reading here.
Can we finally all agree now that stem cell research is worth it?
George Eliot
Two Clowns, One Box
Contortion at its finest. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Anonymous asked: I stumbled upon your blog a year ago and have checked it daily ever since. Your posts range from hilarious to extremely touching and poignant, and I always look forward to them. Especially the quotes you post; they always seem to make me realize that I'm not alone in my experiences, these people were there too. It's hard for me to put my thoughts into writing but you seem to for me with whatever new quote you share. You seem like a truly wonderful person and I just wanted to let you know since I'm always visiting :)
This is like a verbal christmas present. Thank you.
Couple Finally Gets Together After 45,000 Emails
The tale of Melbourne couple Scott and Nicole McIntyre’s 12-year romance involves four internet platforms, 45,000 emails, a Craigslist posting and three continents. The pair lost contact several times after they first began communicating via Yahoo Chat in 1998, picking up the threads of their connection through the internet several times over the years. They were both living in the US at the time, relatively close to one another, but they never met or spoke on the phone. “We just chatted a couple of times about music and films on Yahoo Chat - nothing came of it other than a friendly chat,” Scott said. “We briefly reconnected in 2003 and exchanged a few emails about life until we lost contact again. “I thought about her a lot and every time I met someone with her name, I’d think about her and wonder how her life was going.” Nicole said she didn’t remember much about their conversations but she did remember Scott. “I just remember liking this guy. Someone so nice and smart who happened to share a few minutes of his day with me. Our initial encounter was brief, but it created a lasting impression,” she said. More than a decade after they first began communicating, Scott was living in Amsterdam last December when he woke up to an email that would change his life. An acquaintance had read a posting in the “Lost Connections” section of Craigslist and seen that someone was looking for him. That someone was Nicole. Continue reading here.
