A Cure for AIDS

A Cure for AIDS

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/He..._After_Leukaemia_Sufferer_Undergoes_Operation

breaking news in germany, their appears to be a patient who has had a bone marrow transplant from a person immune to AIDS and it appears they have been cured, good news for alan shearer then

Re: A Cure for AIDS

Re: A Cure for AIDS

dick lol

Drug? He was cured using bone marrow transplant from a person who is resistant to the HIV Virus, how do you think they will syntheise that?

Ok so I understand that you might not get this but to get bone marrow you have to clone human tissue which is against UN and UK law, so unless something changed with that no drug will be created.

Stem cell research is having the same problem as it is esentally human cloning where as stem cells are classed blank cells.

tbh I would think it would be better living with a contained problem (immunosuppressant drugs) than a potential contagious problem such as HIV.

But I agree this will be one of those expensive/long waiting list procedures which will only be offered to those who jump through the hoops, like organ donors.

Where as I agree that the problem is 1/100 are HIV resistant and a low %age of the UK population donate blood let alone marrow, if the cloning laws get changed (and a few appeals have went through for diabetic, alzhiemers and parkinsons at newcastle uni aswell) we could see a big increase of these sort of ops.

If that goes to include growing bone marrow for donor pateints (which will be an continuation of stem cell research) then this could become the cure for HIV and blood cancers.

I know its all a long way off and its getting a lot of opposition but it will become mainstream in the next 10years if you ask me.

and I for one hope it does.

Only good aids it seems.

[ame=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc]Bad Aids[/ame]

Need to get this t-shirt

[yt]8CBgIxA2umM[/yt]

Everything Morris has done is class.

I've got the Jam dvd's in the house too. Now that's fucked up.

i'm putting my 2c in here, as a pharmacologist's perspective...

given that most drugs take 10-12 years to go from lab to shelf, the production costs are usually astronomical, having been designed, synthesised, tested, reconfigured, tested again, clinically trialled at least four times, then mass produced. you also have to allow for the frankly obscene amount of drugs which don't make it to mass production due to any number of reasons, yet have still amassed gargantuan overheads. companies like gsk, astrazeneca, etc. need to recouperate all costs so that they continue to make new drugs, otherwise there'd be no research and no new medicines.

what are your qualms about avastin, aside from its costs?

and regarding this article, it's great news, but for one, sky are useless (there's no such thing as the wrongly-quoted "aids virus" - hiv is the virus, aids is only a syndrome). secondly, and most unfortunately, it seems more of a medical one-off, given that you would have to have all of your bone marrow destroyed before you could have a transplant, to provide an autoimmune response (sky actually mentioned this in that article), and then you'd have to find a donor who had a natural resistance to hiv, which doesn't come around too often!

As has been stated, bone marrow transplants are simply too risky for this to be considered as a viable cure to HIV. What could be interesting is carrying out gene therapy research on people who are resistant to HIV (such as the donor).

HIV has been considered as a manageable condition (like diabetes) in the developed world for a while now. Through anti retroviral treatment, the amount of the virus in the blood can be lowered to undetectable levels, making the chances of transmission virtually zero. Where the problem is is Africa. Drugs are simply too expensive for your average African infected with HIV to afford, and added to this, a different strain is prevalent in most of Africa (HIV-2), which although less infectious than the more common strain at first, is much more viral in later stages of the disease. This is why HIV in Africa is considered a ticking time bomb. And there are also subtle differences as to how you treat the different strains, and it is difficult to measure the viral loads (how much of the virus is in the body) of people with HIV-2, so who knows if this 'cure' (from a white European resistant to HIV) will apply to African's? In the meantime drug companies need to allow cheap generic versions of their drugs to be made available to Africa as the HIV prevalence rates are really scary.

what are you basing your "25 grand" on? i explained earlier wy drugs are so expensive, especially when they're new. you can pick up generic versions of paracetamol, ibuprofen and other NSAIDs for less than 50p, but that's because they've been about for years and the patents have run out. whoever developed avastin (i ashamedly don't know this, but it's more than likely gsk) will have but an almighty amount of money into it since the early-to-mid nineties, and now it's commercially available, will need to recoup some of those costs.

for the record, it does work, it's only GIT and breast cancers which it doesn't really affect. what else, other than to "basically just prolong life for 3 months" would you expect it to do? given that cancer is an uncurable disease...