3 ms·
It would be interesting if we could create a retroviral treatment that cause your body to create these new antibodies. Curing one virus using another.
by Natanael_L 10y ago
It would be interesting if we could create a retroviral treatment that cause your body to create these new antibodies. Curing one virus using another.
- toufka 10y agoThis is very reasonable. Technically, today, it is a bit of a challenge to ensure it gets delivered in such a way as to not hurt more than it helps, and to ensure it remains active. But at this point that kind of auto-manufacturing of a therapeutic an 'engineering problem' rather than a 'scientific problem'. as an aside: Curiously, in the lab at least, most of those therapies are delivered using a 'gutted' version of HIV (precisely because it is so good at delivering genetic payloads to humans). So there's a pretty good chance you'd be using an engineered version of HIV's own machinery to deliver a permanent anti-HIV payload to the patient's genome.
- kgrizzle 10y agoWhat you've described is a similar concept to what immunologists call Vectored Immunoprophylaxis (VIP). VIP has been used effectively in vaccination and treatment of HIV in mouse models [1], and primate trials are ongoing. Essentially this approach entails delivering the gene encoding for an antibody (for example N6 from this paper) directly in a viral vector to cells in the body. This process completely bypasses the traditional physiological vaccination and antibody selection process which may fail to produce a useful antibody such as N6. Instead, the antibody is directly expressed, and secreted from cells that the viral vector infected. Because we know the delivered antibody is effective at targeting the pathogen, these antibodies enable the immune system to home in on the virus in a deterministic way. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3990417/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3990417/