A Cure For AIDS?
A German doctor has cured a man of AIDS using a therapy that is most often used for leukemia patients. In the procudure, the patient had a bone marrow transfusion from an HIV resistant marrow donor. This could be huge.
Just my luck, free love will probably make a return at just about the time that I start looking into Viagra…
I wonder if this is like the whole cold fusion thing.
Good thing Obama is going to put up all those abortion stands in Acme.
Even worse, free love will return as Donviti’s looks start fading.
A cure would be nice, but the real money is in a vaccine. The market for a vaccine is – everybody.
I don’t think a vaccine will work for HIV, anon, but this isn’t my field of expertise.
A vaccine would be great, but so far, all of the trials have ended in failure.
I am not sure it would be good to ever even have a vaccine trial again – after all, in one trial individual were believed to have a higher risk of becoming HIV positive during the trial then they did before. A “live” vaccine is just too risky.
Unless there is a cure. Then you could look for a vaccine with impunity.
Let’s all just keep in mind that this is one instance that has not yet been independently verified, studied, confirmed, tested, etc, etc, etc.
I’m not saying it isn’t an exciting possibility, but they are a long way from proving this even happened.
Understood. Thus the question mark.
We talked about a similar treatment for ebola when I was taking biology during my sophomore year. The key to this, I think, isn’t the blood transfusion; it’s figuring out how to harness the immunities of the cells in question.
BTW, the issue with an HIV vaccine is that HIV is a retrovirus. Vaccines work by putting a dead or weakened form of a virus in your bloodstream so as to create antibodies in response to it without the risk of getting the disease (in its full form, at least). Retroviruses (retroviri?) lack the genetic ‘spell check’ that most organisms have, so they mutate much more quickly as they reproduce; by the time we had a vaccine, the virus we’d be fighting would be completely foreign to the antibodies that had been created, nullifying the effect of the vaccine.