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If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response. Th
by astazangasta 11y ago
If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response. This is not the first time people have demonstrated the ability to excise HIV from the genome - I recall a cool system that involved evolving a novel endonuclease that recognized the HIV LTRs. Aha, here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17600219 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17600219
This is 2007 - doing this again with CRISPR is, frankly, just using a flashy new toolkit. The fundamental problems with gene therapy remain and are, as usual, the major hurdle to any of this shit being effective. It's easy to edit genomes in a dish; doing it in the human body is orders of magnitude harder.
- fndjdh 11y ago>If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response. Not if the HIV infection has progressed to AIDS. Even with a regular HIV infection the immune response would be diminished.
- astazangasta 11y agoNo; HIV targets CD4+ T cells; you will still have CD8s being activated by the lentivirus all over the body and killing cells in response.
- outworlder 11y ago> If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response From a layman's point of view: isn't that exactly what HIV does in the first place, only faster? As I understand it, on initial infection there can be a major immune response, causing skin rashes or worse.