Wow: A Potential AIDS Cure

I'm not getting my hopes up yet but this looks promising.

Having lost two friends to AIDS and knowing the devastation this awful disease has inflected on millions of families throughout the world I hope and pray that this is not another false start and that this may be the beginning of a cure.

From the Wall Street Journal...

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication.

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hütter, a hematologist who isn't an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV.

The development suggests a potential new therapeutic avenue. While cautioning that the Berlin case could be a fluke, David Baltimore, who won a Nobel prize for his research on tumor viruses, deemed it "a very good sign" and a virtual "proof of principle" for gene-therapy approaches.

Last year, AIDS killed two million people; 2.7 million more contracted the virus.

For the full article, click here.