Just to update this since there was so much interest, I looked into the literature a bit more closely. First off, at the end of the article it says "Supported

Just to update this since there was so much interest, I looked into the literature a bit more closely. First off, at the end of the article it says "Supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (K24 CA11787901, 1PN2-EY016586, and R01CA120409), the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (7000-02)." So the funding system was working as expected. It also looks like people have been trying this for a long time and for various reasons it has actually not worked very well. This paper is noteworthy not because they used the HIV modified T-cells. It's noteworthy because people have been banging their heads against this specific brick wall for a long time and coming up empty-handed. The key innovation appears to be the addition of extra machinery that made the T-cells more potent and also the ability for the T-cells to hang around and expand in the patient. Also, to give people a sense of how much time something like this takes. This specific viral mechanism was tested by the same group in mice first and published in August of 2009 (open access: http://www.nature.com/mt/journal/v17/n8/full/mt200983a.html http://www.nature.com/mt/journal/v17/n8/full/mt200983a.html)