3 ms·
would be very much a "rich Western countries only" solution by a very wide margin. Assuming this method pans out as a cure for AIDS... what starts out today as
by crusso 14y ago
would be very much a "rich Western countries only" solution by a very wide margin.
Assuming this method pans out as a cure for AIDS... what starts out today as a solution for those with money causes interest in making it more widely available. Interest leads to new techniques for reducing the cost and complication of bone marrow transplants. Reducing the complication and cost of bone marrow transplants spills over to benefit many other ill people.
Best of all, curing AIDS with any method whatsoever will likely lead to discoveries about the very nature of the disease that could obviate the need for a full marrow transplant.
- jordank 14y agoArguably more importantly, this gives researchers a very strong new lead on developing therapies that have similar effect to bone marrow transplant.
- Cass 14y agoThe thing that makes bone marrow transplantation so expensive (about € 100.000 a pop in Germany, probably more expensive in the US) is that in the time between killing off the patient's own immunosystem and the donor immunosystem taking hold, the patient effectively has no immunosystem at all. This takes about 100 days right now, during which the patient has to be isolated in an environment almost entirely free of pathogens. So if you want affordable bone marrow transplantation, you either need to find a way to cheaply isolate someone while giving them a very high level of medical care, find a way to grow a complete immunosystem in a few days, or find a new drug that'll effectively fight off every possible infection in a body with no protections of its own. Oh, and then of course you have to affordably stop the donor cells from attacking the host's body, too. Finding a cost-effective drug to cure AIDS looks a lot more likely to me than any of that happening in my lifetime.