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> But rearming the body with immune cells similarly modified to resist H.I.V. might well succeed as a practical treatment, experts said. Do people know what is
by temporalparts 8y ago
> But rearming the body with immune cells similarly modified to resist H.I.V. might well succeed as a practical treatment, experts said.
Do people know what is the existing literature on injecting or transplanting different or modified immune cells into someone as a general class of cures? Seems like this could generalize into something of an alternative to vaccine (or a different class of cures).
- zaroth 8y agoThere’s a massive arm of cancer research devoted to exactly this, called immunotherapy. It’s where many of the best new treatments are being discovered lately. People are calling it the new chemo. It’s particular promising in leukemia, for example. Typically involves injecting a growth factor and then harvesting stem cells from peripheral blood (as supposed to having to go into the marrow directly), then processing the cells in some way to make them more antagonistic to the cancerous mutations. In some cases the cancerous cells will be tagged with some marker that can then be used as a target site the extracted cells can be trained on. Then the patient’s own stem-cells are transplanted back into their body to do their work. Sometimes the patient gets ablated before reintoducing the new cells. That’s called an autologous (“auto”) stem-cell transplant.