Linkage

[rowyn]

A couple of unrelated links:

Potential breakthrough in AIDS treatment.

This one is so cool I'm gonna try summarizing it. There's a naturally-occuring rare mutation that make some humans practicaly immune to AIDS. German doctors were treating an American citizen in Germany who had both AIDS and leukemia, and who had failed the first round of leukemia treatment. The next stage recommended was bone marrow transplant. His doctor knew about the immunity mutation and so located a bone marrow donor who had it.

600 days later, the man has no signs of the AIDS virus in him. To all appearances, he's cured. Which is amazingly cool and miraculous all by itself.

This is not a practical treatment in this form,'cause full bone marrow transplants have a 30% mortality rate, and AIDS with drug treatment for the symptoms has a better survival rate than that. But they're hoping to make an injectable gene therapy form of the treatment that would be not only reliable, but cheap and easy enough to administer that it could be used in the third world, where AIDS is still killing millions. That's still just a theory, but ... wow! So awesome. Article has lots more details, go read the source. It'll make you smile!

The Washington Post's survey on their electoral coverage. An interesting piece. Mostly I just want to give props to the Post for doing the survey and publishing the results. It's nice to see a news organization examining its own biases.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That is pretty neat! I wonder what else they can cure that way?

[level-head.livejournal.com]

There are quite a few diseases that are caused by an overproduction, or more frequently an underproduction, of a certain protein. These are "busted genes," basically, since in general one gene is the instruction to make one protein.

Sometimes just adding new cells, producing the missing substance, is all you need -- this is apparently what's going on with the HIV work above.

But more often, the missing (or too-abundant) substance affects every cell in the body, and each cell needs to be modified.

It's actually possible to do this. Viruses generally work by inserting their DNA into yours. We've "tamed" some viruses to insert a piece of DNA that we've designed alongside their own, and modified their own to be less harmful.

This doesn't always work -- sometimes the virus is still a problem, and sometimes the insert breaks something else.

But we're making progress.

Killing an extra copy of a gene where too much of something is being made is more difficult -- because your target looks just like the one you want to keep. But there are still some tricks possible, and we're making progress there too.

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

The nature of viruses makes them tricky to use: all that replication gives lots of opportunities for mutations to occur, if nothing else. But it's a fascinating process!

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Sometimes just adding new cells, producing the missing substance, is all you need -- this is apparently what's going on with the HIV work above.

As I understand it, it's more that a nonfunctional form of the protein is being produced, leaving HIV wandering around metaphorically trying to open a door with a fake doorknob. I think you'd also need to repress the normal one in addition to introducing the nonfunctional variant. Though, I haven't looked into whether any useful effects have been observed in people with one of each type.

[rowyn]

I remember the first time I learned how viruses worked, thinking "That sounds like a potential way to do genetic engineering on adult." :) The gene therapy viruses were a plot point in my original vision of the Hope story, although it's been so long I'm not sure I even remember how the chain was supposed to go ...