Engineered Stem Cells Seek out and Kill HIV in Living Mice

reply to post by ILikeStars


Wow, incredible news. Now can they do the same thing with cancer?

Late pass. A German scientist accidentally found the cure for HIV last year while trying to cure leukemia.

Yup even with things like this showing the promise of stem cell research some other country will be getting the patents.

reply to post by buster2010


Well, of course it's quite possible, as obviously stem-cell research is not just being carried out in one country.

reply to post by Phagette


So, from what I read then, this treatment will not cure hiv, but will contribute to making it a treatable chronic disease.

Although thats better than death of course, it does stroke my conspiracy mindset..."they" never want to cure it, they want repeat customers, so a endless expensive treatment is the optimal outcome verses a out and out cure.

I can appreciate people rolling eyes at me for suggesting this of course..and no doubt plenty of good scientists are working hard at finding a cure verses a treatment...just a bit frustrating. 20 years of research and trial/error on a global level and still not much further along than the starting point. Not that this is different mind you...they have been throwing money and brainpower at cancer for longer and with less results. Not sure if I am leaning towards conspiracy or just a realization of how slow and made of fail human ability is in effective treatments and cures.

Originally posted by kn0wh0w
not to piss on the parade here.

but posted already with the exact same title

got 2 replies...

LOL

good find nonetheless

Yes it was!!! A full day earlier none the less! Sorry kn0wh0w. I did flag and star that by the way. Maybe not enough people paying attention to the Medical forum I guess. I went there and skimmed through prior to posting this but must have overlooked it. All apologies.

But, with all the wisdom and knowledge brought to us in this thread by Phagette, not sure what to do. Mods could choose to shut this thread down and we could cut and paste Phagette's contributions to the conversation.

Sorry kn0wh0w for missing that thread. I was suprised that no one on ATS had posted anything about this, but apparently I did not look hard enough for it.

Good find op, But of course the FDA will never approve of this, they want their super-virus.

Originally posted by ILikeStars

Originally posted by kn0wh0w
not to piss on the parade here.

but posted already with the exact same title

got 2 replies...

LOL

good find nonetheless

Yes it was!!! A full day earlier none the less! Sorry kn0wh0w. I did flag and star that by the way. Maybe not enough people paying attention to the Medical forum I guess. I went there and skimmed through prior to posting this but must have overlooked it. All apologies.

But, with all the wisdom and knowledge brought to us in this thread by Phagette, not sure what to do. Mods could choose to shut this thread down and we could cut and paste Phagette's contributions to the conversation.

Sorry kn0wh0w for missing that thread. I was suprised that no one on ATS had posted anything about this, but apparently I did not look hard enough for it.

No worries!

Please MODS, keep this one open!

The information provided here is more of value then the one in my thread.

Again, no worries though.

Hey all you pessimistic conspiracy brothers and sisters, look at this way. They can always make new super vampire/zombie viruses.

Big Pharma and Gov't and private investors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into research. They HAVE allow break through research through and show productivity or they will appear to be corrupt and evil!

NOOOOO!!!!!!!! There's no corruption in big pharma!

Originally posted by buster2010
Yup even with things like this showing the promise of stem cell research some other country will be getting the patents. Because the bible thumpers keep doing everything to hold it back here in the states. Let's hope these doctors can find other diseases to cure using this.

Pharma has an interest in striking down stem cell research as well. Its more costly to look after lasting symptoms than to administer a cure. There is always money behind these groups and I bet in this case it comes from Pharma.

That is amazing. I wonder if these cells could help to cure Type 1 Diabetes? I really hope so.. I am sick of this BS disease.

reply to post by kn0wh0w


ATSers like you make this place great kn0wh0w. Thanks for being so understanding and forgiving.

reply to post by Gridrebel


Yes, actually! And at the same lab! newsroom.ucla.edu...

Using T cells as immunotherapy is not "new" per se. But T cells don't like to live a long time. Their job is to get in, kill what needs to be killed and then die out (it's called Activation Induced Cell Death and it happens naturally to T cells). The problem is, chronic diseases like cancer and HIV need persisting, long lived, memory responses and engineered T cells are often too highly activated (in order to be better killers) so that they only live a couple weeks in the patient. Permanently modifying blood progenitors cells offers this hope of long lasting, memory responses. Of course, cancer, like HIV, mutates and evolves under the pressure of the immune system so that escape happens in some people. Of course, as a scientists, that's also fascinating. In the earlier melanoma T cell receptor Phase I clinical trial (we are already in phase II: clinicaltrials.gov...), we saw the scans of people in the trial with highly metastatic disease, dark spots all over their scans. A couple months later, one patient in particular presented with an enormous reduction in those dark spots - goosebumps from excitement! Except two spots - they got larger. After a biopsy of those metastatic lesions, it was as we suspected: they had mutated and evolved to avoid the treatment. Luckily, they were able to be removed and this patient it still alive today, over a decade later!

So, yes, this technology (transgenic T cell receptors) can be used to treat cancer. However, putting this technology in adult T cells is considerably safer and simpler than putting it into progenitor cells, so that has lagged a little. But it will succeed. If not for cancer or HIV, then definitely for sickle cell anemia and hemoglobin disorder.

Meanwhile, genetic modifications to progenitor cells for genetic diseases like sickle cell or hemoglobin diseases (like beta thalassemia) is making much faster progress. Here's just one clinical trial: clinicaltrials.gov...

And guess what? Every single one of these "cures" has been patented and each one has a bevy of pharm/biotech companies asking to produce/manufacture it.

reply to post by OGOldGreg


I had the privilege of meeting Timothy Ray Brown, the patient cured of AIDS. His story is indeed fascinating, scientifically, but his experience was near torture. Here's just one interview with him: www.youtube.com...

You'll notice his speech and cognition are impaired. That happened after the second bone marrow transplant. When his GVHD (graft vs host disease, which we count on - the donor's healthy bone marrow cells will become normal, healthy immune cells and naturally seek out and kill leukemic cells along with pretty much all of the host's immune cells) began attacking, he experienced a severely high fever, which left him with permanent brain damage. He has neurologists working with him for free to help "repair" his cognitive problems.

The science behind the "cure" is quite simple. Remember I said way back in my earlier posts that HIV preferentially infects CD4 cells, well that's somewhat simplified. There are actually two main types of HIV. Both prefer CD4 to be on the surface of the cell it infects as all forms of HIV bind to CD4. Then one form of HIV (we call it R5-tropic) likes to also bind to the CCR5 receptor while another form (we call it X4-tropic) likes to also bind to the CXCR4 receptor. Both CCR5 and CXCR4 are on the surface of immune cells and each receptor serves a different function in helping T cells or macrophages know where they should be in the body and what exactly their role should. So, infecting cells that need CCR5 or CXCR4 to do their jobs, impairs the immune system similarly to infecting CD4 cells.

But what's really interesting is there is a small population that is more enriched in Germany that have a mutation in their CCR5 gene so that the protein/receptor is never expressed on the cell's surface! This mutation in the human population is thought to have come about when smallpox (which also uses CCR5 to enter into cells) ravished Europe.

So now realize that there are a group of people (albeit small) who are less susceptible to HIV, at least one form of HIV. Would it be possible to transfer the immune system from these people to HIV infected people, making the recipient less susceptible to HIV? Curing them? What an amazing experiment that would be. But honestly, the process of a bone marrow transplant is really, really, really hard on the recipient. Sometimes people even die from the transplant. So under what circumstances should we be willing to try this experiment? Especially since we are talking about experimenting on humans, not on mice or lab rats.

Well, leukemia is often treated with bone marrow transplants. So when the doctor's working with Timothy Ray Brown realized that he had leukemia and HIV and he happened to living in Germany, the place with the largest amount of CCR5 defective people in the world, they decided this was the man to test their theory on. At first, after they told him of the risks and side effects, he said no. They asked him again, are you sure?! He said no. So, they began traditional chemotherapy. But after a couple months, he did not "tolerate" the chemo - in other words, it nearly killed him and they had to stop. He went off to Italy, to come to peace with the fact that he was going to die.

But the doctors would not give up and at great cost, they scanned all the donors in their database for one that was both an HLA match (for the bone marrow part and curing leukemia) and was CCR5 defective. They found not one, but three! They implored Timothy Ray Brown again, please, please, let us save you! He finally relented. The first bone marrow transplant seemed to treat the disease they were most concerned about since it was leukemia killing him, not HIV. In fact, Timothy Ray Brown had been on HAART therapy and his viral loads were nearly undetectable. However, they suspended his HAART treatment on the day of his first surgery and unlike most people, his viral loads never rebounded. Sadly, his leukemia did. And he needed a second bone marrow transplant. This one cured his leukemia, but after the fight of his life, left him with the painful side effects of cognitive impairment.

So, should this "cure" be available as a standard treatment for HIV? Sadly, less than 0.1% of the American population have this mutation, so finding CCR5 defective donors is going to be a challenge. How about if we engineer the patient's own blood progenitor's cells (which essentially come from the bone marrow) to be CCR5 defective? That is EXACTLY what we and others are doing!
www.sciencedaily.com...
www.aidsmeds.com...
clinicaltrials.gov...

reply to post by Phagette




I'm glad someone read my comment. everyone here needs to read what this guy said.

And even if there is a legit cure, I doubt you'll see it in the US anytime soon due to the way it was found.

And proof of such ideals is right in front of peoples eyes.

My mom found out 6 months ago that she has celiacs(spelling?) disease. It is a disease where the body cannot breakdown gluten(anything with flour or wheat pretty much). Celiacs was not popularly diagnosed in the United States until about a decade ago. While the reasoning behind it was not because of the stem cell research though, it was because there is no definite cure for the disease, which in turn meant that the pharmaceutical companies could not make any money on it. So therefore it was not diagnosed.

If you do some research you will see it's been being diagnosed in Europe and other places for decades. But not int he US until about the year 2000.

And no this is not an opinion or a conspiracy theory. This is 100% fact. Ask ANY dietitian.

reply to post by OGOldGreg


I know it's frustrating when doctors, whom we are indoctrinated to think are all-knowing gods, do not diagnose diseases correctly/timely, disagree with each other as to the causes of a disease or if there is even a disease to begin with, and fail to provide adequate medication. But much like all fields of science, medicine is also a work in progress. You must understand that the American style of medicine is fact-based and change requires extensive "proof." We do not change our diagnoses simply because other countries have. We do not change our course of treatments simply because other countries have. In fact, many, many doctors I know think American medicine is notoriously inflexible, despite political ideologies insisting the opposite (I wont comment on that). American doctors and hospitals are so afraid of being sued, the consequence is that we change policies (with reference to diagnoses and course of treatments) only once proper studies have proved that doing so is safe and more effective than previously established methods. And young doctors, especially, who have all sorts of great ideas and are motivated by an ambition to "cure the world" find these dogmatic slowdowns disillusioning.

As to celiac disease, wow! Now there's another fascinating and relatively "new" disease. It always surprises me when we discover "new" diseases that affect hundreds and thousands of people. Yet, it IS relatively new to human medicine when you consider we've been recording diseases for more than 2 thousand years. Anything remotely similar to celiac disease has been hard pressed to find! However, a similar disease was actually described by Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a physician active in Anatolia just over 2000 years ago, during a period of rapid development, when agriculture had spread to the so-called region of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle-East. This disease likely lay low in a few populations as our diets changed faster than our genes could adapt. Why the sudden burst of celiac disease as of late? I'll let you ATSers have a field day as to that conspiracy - I choose not to comment. I don't really care, honestly. I'm more interested in the facts behind the disease - causes, mostly, then once we understand how and why it happens, possible treatments.

Here is an excerpt from a review on celiac disease published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology (Aug 28, 2011; Ages of celiac disease: from changing environment to improved diagnostics; AlbertoTommasini, et al). I know you're not an immunologist, so while it's easy for me to read, you may not understand all of it. But, hopefully, it will help you to understand that while progress has been slow, there has actually been progress:

"From the time of Gee’s landmark writings, the recent history of celiac disease (CD) can be divided into many ages, each driven by a diagnostic advance and a deeper knowledge of disease pathogenesis. At the same time, these advances were paralleled by the identification of new clinical patterns associated with CD and by a continuous redefinition of the prevalence of the disease in population. In the beginning, CD was considered a chronic indigestion, even if the causative food was not known; later, the disease was proven to depend on an intolerance to wheat gliadin, leading to typical mucosal changes in the gut and to a malabsorption syndrome. This knowledge led to curing the disease with a gluten-free diet. After the identification of antibodies to gluten (AGA) in the serum of patients and the identification of gluten-specific lymphocytes in the mucosa, CD was described as an immune disorder, resembling a chronic “gluten infection”. The use of serological testing for AGA allowed identification of the higher prevalence of this disorder, revealing atypical patterns of presentation. More recently, the characterization of autoantibodies to endomysium and to transglutaminase shifted the attention to a complex autoimmune pathogenesis and to the increased risk of developing autoimmune disorders in untreated CD. New diagnostic assays, based on molecular technologies, will introduce new changes, with the promise of better defining the spectrum of gluten reactivity and the real burden of gluten related-disorders in the population. Herein, we describe the different periods of CD experience, and further developments for the next celiac age will be proposed."

For people truly interested in CD, this is a great paper to begin with for your education. Sadly, it is copyrighted and I cannot simply cut and paste the entire thing here. This website might work (I can never tell which papers are "free" to all versus to scientists since I have an online subscription): www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

HIV is a massive hoax/disinfo campaign, that has made pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars since the fraud was initially put into the media back in the early 80s.

reply to post by D_Mason


Wow, VERY intelligent insight to add to the discourse

reply to post by D_Mason


I don't know too much about HIV/AIDS but I don't doubt that there has been a lot of disinfo on the subject, but could you explain the hoax part? I'm sure a lot of HIV patients would argue that their disease is real.

There used to be a lot of stuff out there about the WHO having developed AIDS on purpose and such, is that what you mean by hoax?

Just curious. Not trying to start anything trolly.

Sounds like wonderful news; however, I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone to stock up on supplies.... The scenario from "I am legend" may be upon us shortly.. * smile *

reply to post by Phagette

Originally posted by Phagette
reply to post by fictitious

 

"Something useful with stem cells"? If you were really interested in when 'they were going to do something interesting with stem cells" you'd know about the dozens of clinical trials already underway for all sorts of neurological diseases, cancer, blood disorders, etc. Not to mention the hundreds of companies world-wide whose sole purpose is to develop stem cell-based treatments.

Laziness is no excuse for your ignorance. Check the literature before you make uninformed comments.

Last time I checked, an opinion doesn't necessarily mean ignorance - pertaining to any subject. Regardless of how knowledgeable you are in an area, that does not give you the go ahead to be rude to others. Last I heard, several companies who study stem cells shut down because they found that they simply do not work as originally thought and had a lack of funding.
Geron Corp shuts down

The reason for ATS is to get knowledge out there and deny ignorance - not criticize others who are trying to contribute to a thread.

Someone who is a genius but does not have respect for others will never successfully teach/have an impact on anyone.