USC Researchers find new hope for HIV treatment

 

[caption id="attachment_10779" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Blood donor - wikimedia commons"][/caption]

 Carol Forsloff - Stem cell research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC has successfully has shown transplantation of blood stem cells modified to be resistant to HIV into mice, allowing the animals to control HIV infections.

If this same approach can be used on humans, this would be a major step towards the control of HIV/AIDS.  It would enable HIV-resistant T cells in a patient's body to regenerate, allowing the patient's own cells to fight the HIV and suppress it.

“This hybrid gene and stem cell therapy shows that it is possible to create HIV resistant immune cells that can eventually win the battle against HIV in vivo,” said principal investigator Paula Cannon, associate professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “We’ve done it at the scale of a mouse, and the challenge now is to see if this can be done at the scale of a human patient.”

This is an important breakthrough in the war against HIV/AIDS, researchers hope.

“By engineering CCR5-deficient stem cells, we may allow a patient to produce HIV resistant cells in all of the cell types that the virus infects and for long periods of time,” Cannon said. “If successful, it could one day allow patients to control their HIV without needing to take antiretroviral drugs.”