Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Can We Cure HIV Using Stem Cells?
You are HIV+. The virus is undetectable from the use of HAART. Is it possible to cure HIV from the body? Physicians from Germany appear to have done so. They describe a 40-year-old man—an American working in Berlin—whose HIV had been under good control for several years using a typical cocktail of drugs known as HAART. Then he developed acute leukemia. In an attempt to cure the leukemia, he underwent a course of radiation therapy and chemotherapy in preparation for a stem cell transplant. The patient's stem cell transplant was a success. Furthermore, now off HAART for almost two years, the patient shows no detectable signs of HIV in his blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain. This patient represents a functional cure. Is this the future of HIV therapy? Are stem cells the answer to HIV/AIDS? Are we finally at the door to a cure? What are your thoughts? What do you think of this?
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7 comments:
I think that the new research on bolstering the immune systems natural response seems the most promising as far as a cure for AIDS/HIV goes, I had never heard of stem cell use.
http://www.aidsdrugsonline.com
Sorry, there is no way to cure the HIV, we can prevent it. There are many ways to prevent it with the medicines. Also you can make the immune system to work properly and prevent it.
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There is no way to cure HIV. Complementary therapies can be very beneficial however they are not a cure.
If this method of supressing HIV is currently available, why doesn't my doctor schedule me for a stem cell treatment. Who can receive this treatment? I am very interested in joining any waiting list!
Wow, thanks for your comments. I guess we all are a little hesitant when we hear the words "cure" and "HIV" in the same sentence. At this time, HIV/AIDS is an incurable although manageable disease, Stem cell research may produce some positive results in the future, but as to what those results are we will have to wait and see.
I think the key word here is chemotherapy, not stem cell. Chemoterapy is killing all rapidly reproducing cells and cause a severe but temporal damage to immune system. That's why all patients under chemoterapy are kept in almost sterile conditions. When i learned this fact (my colleague was going throught chemotherapy for acute leucosis) I though of chemotherapy as a possible way to cure HIV, but later gave up the idea as "stupid". Now it looks we have an accidental experiment being done proving there is apossibility. Is there any study showing the effect of chemotherapy on immune system parts in details? Was it ever studied?
The positive success of this patient is an accidental outcome as his donated stem cells carries a ccr5 gene. This geneitc defect prevents hiv virus from infecting T cell. This CCR5 genetic altered trait is only present in less than 1 percent of the populaion. This reserch direction is increasingly becoming more important.
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