CRISPR Eliminates HIV In Live Animals (genengnews.com) 139
Researchers from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh show that HIV-1 infections can be eliminated from the genomes of living animals. Findings from the study have been published in the journal Molecular Therapy. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News reports: This is the first study to demonstrate that HIV-1 replication can be completely shut down and the virus eliminated from infected cells in animals with a powerful gene-editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. The new work builds on a previous proof-of-concept study that the team published in 2016, in which they used transgenic rat and mouse models with HIV-1 DNA incorporated into the genome of every tissue of the animals' bodies. They demonstrated that their strategy could delete the targeted fragments of HIV-1 from the genome in most tissues in the experimental animals. In this new study, the LKSOM team genetically inactivated HIV-1 in transgenic mice, reducing the RNA expression of viral genes by roughly 60% to 95% -- confirming their earlier findings. They then tested their system in mice acutely infected with EcoHIV, the mouse equivalent of human HIV-1. In the third animal model, a latent HIV-1 infection was recapitulated in humanized mice engrafted with human immune cells, including T cells, followed by HIV-1 infection. "These animals carry latent HIV in the genomes of human T cells, where the virus can escape detection," Dr. Hu explained. Amazingly, after a single treatment with CRISPR/Cas9, viral fragments were successfully excised from latently infected human cells embedded in mouse tissues and organs.
Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:5, Funny)
Because this is how you get a zombie apocalypse.
Re:Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I, too, have a hard-on thinking about an HIV cure.
Re: Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:5, Funny)
But AIDS is so 1980s. Cancer is what the cool kids have these days.
Oh wait, the word 'cool' is now retro too, having been replaced by the word "sick". So I guess the proper way to say it is "Cancer is what all the sick kids have these days."
Re: Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:1)
HIV used to be called gay cancer. HIV is always your chance to get the cool disease.
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It was called gay cancer because sufferers of Gay-Related Immune Deficiency had cancer, specifically Kaposi sarcoma.
CRISPR/Cas9's origin (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just that, but this sounds like an approach you could adapt to any virus.
Well, given how/why CRISPR/cas9 evolved in prokaryote in the first place.
Prokaryotes ended up with this systems because it helps them remove foreign DNA (phages, plasmids).
Curing HIV is about removing its foreign DNA from the infected white blood cells.
So CRISPR could be applied to curing viruses such as VIH.
Hey, what a surprise !
Yes, it could be used to eliminate tons of currently hard to cure viruses.
(Note: I'm not belittling the accomplishment of the researcher who developed this cure candidate.
There's surely a lot of work done to addapt to this use.
I'm just saying is that these kind of application is what bacteria evolved CRIPR for in the nature,
so it's not surprising that we could apply it for a similar task in eukaryote regarding viruses.
It's the "weirdly simple gene editor" use that is unexpected)
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So doing some reading based on your comment. I had no idea the extent of viruses ending up in our DNA... since ancient times and they can be very very beneficial. Some of this article sounds so insanely weird, I almost feel like it is fake. Time to read other sources.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/... [wired.com]
Quote: "The placenta example points to a second way for endogenous retroviruses to turn beneficial: if their viral genes are straight up reused in new way. The same gene that allowed a virus to fuse to a mammal
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Car metaphor (Score:2)
I love how CRISPR makes geneticists act like a bunch of little kids who found a working go-cart someone left in a dumpster.
Except this time round, metaphorically they actually use it to really do go-cart laps on a nearby track (though necessarily the same track as the guy who threw it in the dumpster).
Unlike all the other times when they decide to re-purpose it for something completely different, like using it as a delivery vehicle with optional autonomous navigation (which actually works more or less),
or trying to conquer the world with it and at least managing to build a self-driving tank out of it (by strapping a bazooka on
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CRISPR has potential application for flu (Score:5, Insightful)
Per this article in Scientific American [scientificamerican.com]--
Note the open-source mindset already beginning to surround CRISPR! Researchers are exchanging their CRISPR recipes without concern for patents and intellectual property. This can really accelerate progress with developing CRISPR-based treatments.
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HIV being a retrovirus puts its genome into the hosts genome. Basically it moves into a cell and settles in for the long haul, goes latent, then eventually sending out copies of itself at a leisurely pace. Other viruses like the cold come into cells and completely take over, pumping out copies of themselves in a mad dash, blowing up the cell in a matter of days, releasing more of the viruses. There's little time for the procedure here to take out the virus in such a situation: the cell
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CRISPR kits cost around $100-$1000. If you were to mass produce therapeutic CRISPR injections in batches of a million, they'd cost pennies per dose. The extra cost is recouping research, profit, costs associated with extra care for experimental patients, etc.
Re:Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:4, Insightful)
The point being, it was the first. Bleeding-edge tech ALWAYS costs. The example of big-screen TVs is instructive. I'm in my mid-50s, and recall when any TV above a 26 inch tube was purely a rich man's toy. Price came down. Then flatscreen monitors, both TV and computer came out. Expensive and small. Now they're big and cheap, to the point you can pull a box with one off the shelf at your local Wally-world.
The same model applies to Medical Technologies. The only difference is, EVERYONE demands the bleeding edge (pardon the phrase) in medical technology. . .
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Another difference is that people *need* medical technology. You can get by just fine without a big TV. Since your life would depend on the technology, the opportunities for price inflation are much stronger.
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You have no right to make someone else pay for your stuff no matter how badly you want or even need it.
FULL STOP.
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2. A parent-child relationship is completely different from the relationship that two unrelated citizens have. It's dishonest to pretend otherwise.
3. My parents willingly gave me resources as I was growing up as long as I obeyed their rules. It's a kind of contract. I could have ended our relationship and left to live on my own, but that would be stupid of me to do so. It was far better to just obey, learn, and remain in my relationshi
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But what if the GP is richer than you (or represents a consortium who have pooled their resources because they just don't like you)? I assume that you're ok with the GP showing up at your house with 5 police officers, politely waiting while you rifle through the couch cushions for the money to hire five police officers of your own, then making a phone call and ordering himself fifteen more officers. Then, I suppose, just to rub it in the GP could just stand around waiting for the money you paid to run out, and for you to desperately call everyone you know for a loan (I don't think organized credit could exist in your world since it's a form of pooled risk sharing too) until your police officers desert you. Then the GP could basically just go ahead and pummel you mercilessly while his police officers stand around taking bets on how many teeth he's going to leave you.
The situation you just described is basically the same as what we call a "government" isn't it?
But regardless of how unhappy I would be in such circumstances (ridiculous and hypothetical as they may be) it would still be wrong of me to force someone to give me money, protection, resources, whatever.
So, are you ok with that? I get the feeling that you love the idea of a world where you could do that to other people, ...
Now you're just straight up insulting my character without knowing anything about me-- and nothing I've said so far even implies that I would like to do such things as you describe to other people.
However, you
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Maybe it has something to do with the way you've been straight up insulting other people's characters.
I did not insult anyone's character. I only pointed out that the person who insulted me was a hypocrite and was projecting.
The bit about your taxes covering the cost is a little confusing. In order to be consistent with your position on health insurance the costs you would pay in your taxes would have to be very specifically the charges that you personally incurred for police protection. In other words, per-incident charges for every time you make use of the police based on man-hours used, equipment charges, travel time compensation, fuel, dispatch charges, hazard fees, service fees, regulatory compliance recovery fees (although, if they work under absolutely no regulations, I guess they couldn't rightfully charge you those fees, but, since they're not working under any regulations, they can charge you the fees anyway, so it all works out), etc. I have no idea how you would pay for your exact share of policing activities like patrolling under your scheme. How would you envision that being fairly apportioned so that you're not being forced to pay for the protection of others and so that they aren't forced to pay for yours? It seems really tricky. Maybe do it in time slices. While they're driving down the street, the police pay attention to your property for ten seconds and react if a crime is happening. While they're focusing on your house, they ignore all other crime that may be happening unless it's affecting your property and, they ignore all crime affecting your property when they move on to the next house. Sounds like that could work well for billing purposes. A bit problematic if your child is ever kidnapped. There's probably no way you could afford the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of police resources that are often used when a child is kidnapped (sadly, in the real world, the economic bracket of the kidnapped child often does affect how much is spent on rescuing them). Basically, it's hard to see how your scheme, taken to its logical conclusion wouldn't lead to a situation where whoever can afford the most Pinkertons being able to do as they please (up to and including kidnapping your child, if it pleases them)
You're making a lot of sense, and I can see how the logical conclusion that you came to sounds reprehensible. And I agree that such a situation would be reprehensible. But...
1. I think we're already in a situation where the rich people who can buy the most pinkertons are abusing others: just look at how the political elites flout the law-- pen and phone?! Clintons and Bushes getting of
Re:Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:4, Interesting)
In a few years, no-one's going to give a crap about whether these treatments are approved by some government, when they can download a file from the Internet that specifies the genetic changes and send it to their Home DNA Modification Kit.
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Using your 3D printer.
Of course.
Re:Do you want a zombie apocalypse? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny. Except that you can buy CRISPR kits specifically designed for home experiments. Right now. For $100.
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If I'm thinking of the same thing you are, the reason it is so expensive is that there are so few patients - like a few dozen. (It's not even clear to me why they pursued that in the first place, given that it seems like it would be impossible to even recoup their initial investment, much less make a profit.) There is a much larger pool of HIV patients (supposedly 1.2 million in the US alone), even if you just focus on rich nations, and they could still charge what sounds like an extortionate amount of mo [wikipedia.org]
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The affordable market price: now only $200k-500k per shot!
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And if they have good health insurance, it would probably be a bargain compared to what is already being spent on existing HIV medications.
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HIV is a much bigger problem in 3rd world countries. And, contrary to your "belief", it is primarily a heterosexual disease outside the US.
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I'd rather be a spider than a snail!
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What do obscure, misquoted song lyrics have to do with anything?
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Nothing was misquoted, which you'd understand if you could comprehend the meaning of a quote.
Your claim is not even self-consistent; do you think I quoted something, or do you think I said something slightly different? And did it have quotes? So it was different, and without quotes or reference? It isn't even possible to be a misquote.
There are lots of other potential meanings you could consider that are self consistent, though.
You remind me of some CRISPR-head who ignores the dangers merely because they di
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WTF? What you wrote was literally one word off from the first line of El Condor Pasa [youtube.com] by Simon and Garfunkel (and at least one person [wordpress.com] managed to misquote it the same way previously).
More to the point, what's your goddamn problem? You're clearly some kind of idiotically furious nutjob if you're going to get that bent out of shape at the (apparently) heinous accusation that you might have been making a pop-culture reference! And if not a reference, then what the hell else was it supposed to be?! It had nothing
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You: "No, calm down, there is no zombie apocalypse. See, look at the test results: It says the same thing that I expected it to, just off by one word. Therefore, it can only be typo. CRISPR would never intentionally change just one word. If it was a design bug, everything about the result would be different."
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Biotech News Blues (Score:2)
HIV-1 infected animals (Score:1)
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"Yes, I'm very glad to hear I don't have to use any protection when engaging in fornication and adultery."
No, seriously, I'm sure there are people out there who make this their take-home message of the article.
It doesn't actually. Have you heard of PreP? It is a treatment of Antivirals (Truvada) given to an HIV negative person who is at high risk of becoming infected to act as a prophylactic. PreP is very effective against HIV infection and studies have shown it does not alter condom use. So the notion a "cure" for HIV would change sexual risk behaviors is a bit of a false flag. If someone is prone to risky behavior they tend to do it regardless of risk.
Flabbergasted by the implications (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't expect a silver bullet - AIDS will be cured like cancer, driven into remission, and only "cured" after we're confident that it won't show up again later on.
In spite of that? I expect it's going to be far cheaper than treating patients with long duration HAART cocktails, and treating the side effects of those drugs. Even if each patient's viral strains have to be sequenced, and a CRISPR cocktail picked based on the strains harbored, AIDS drugs are not cheap. This could be a turning point representing the beginning of the end of AIDS.
Re:Flabbergasted by the implications (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if each patient's viral strains have to be sequenced, and a CRISPR cocktail picked based on the strains harbored, AIDS drugs are not cheap. This could be a turning point representing the beginning of the end of AIDS.
I agree. And this could also have the additional benefit of driving costs down for sequencing, and CRISPR-based therapies, which could in turn bring such a cure to more people, and enable the same to be done for other diseases.
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So your flabbergasted that a prokaryotic immune system that protects bacteria from viral infections can be used to protect eukaryotic cells from viral infections too?
Hijacking CRISPR/Cas9 for editing DNA is the "flabbergasting" bit, not using it for what it evolved for. Now wake me up when you can use this to cure HxNy please.
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Flabbergasted by the implications
The implications of CRISPR-Cas9 overall are flabbergasting.
It suddenly allows much, much more complex, precise and reliable gene editing than the previous transfection systems. It is ludicrously, phenomenally, powerful and the surface is just being scratched.
There are vast implications, both positie and negative. Like any tool, it has the power to do great harm as well as amazing good. The cat's out of the bag and anyway it's just too powerful to ignore, so it's going to be
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When you're removing things, it works about as well as you suggest. When you want to add something (changing requires removal AND adding) then it's a lot better than anything before, but it still involves a lot of random chance. You can't really use something that random therapeutically.
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IIRC, this CRISPR/Cas system shouldn't require individualized patient sequencing. HIV does have highly conserved regions of its genome, and disrupting those is enough to render the proviral genome completely non-functional.
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HIV/AIDS is nothing like cancer. HIV/AIDS has but a few variations of the virus, cancer has hundreds of variations. Even when you "cure" one form of cancer in an individual, the cancer often mutates into another form that previous treatment is no longer effective. This treatment might be effective if you can detect the various mutations and un-do the mutations that are causing there cancer. PBS had very good 6 part serious on current cancer research.
Virus Cure? (Score:1)
This is great news if they can take it out of the lab! I also hope this can be applied to other viruses!
Subtypes of HIV (Score:4, Informative)
HIV-1 is the most common and pathogenic strain of the virus.
HIV-2 has not been widely recognized outside of Africa.
HIV-2 has been found to be less pathogenic than HIV-1. The mechanism of HIV-2 is not clearly defined, nor the difference from HIV-1, however the transmission rate is much lower in HIV-2 than HIV-1.
source [wikipedia.org]
Bill HIcks (Score:4, Funny)
"I dunno how much AIDS scares y'all, but I got a theory: the day they come out with a cure for AIDS, a guaranteed one-shot cure, on that day there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man."
Re:Bill HIcks (Score:5, Insightful)
Not having this boogie man can actually make those other diseases spike.
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tong in cheek
That sounds painful. :-)
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It's cool, thanks for being a good sport about it :-)
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Plenty of people who do have English as their first language can't spell "tongue". It's one of those common English words with a spelling that, for historical reasons, is bizarre even by the lax standards of English.
Anyway, in this case there's something to be said for "tong in cheek".
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That article makes the point though that STI rates in San Francisco are still way below "abstinence only" regions in the south. So it would seem that the AIDS scare isn't having an effect anyway in the areas it would matter most.
This is awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Gene editing, through every part of the organism reachable by the immune system, in a live mammal. HIV will ultimately be a mere footnote, because this technology is an early first step to editing your own genome as a consenting adult instead of fiddling around with the genes of a fertilized egg and hoping you haven't screwed over a future person's life in the process.
You won't be rebuilding large structures in the body with this, but there's still so much that can be done if you can alter genes in an adult. There are a lot of deleterious genetic conditions that can be corrected, and then you move on to upgrading.
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Gene editing, through every part of the organism reachable by the immune system, in a live mammal. HIV will ultimately be a mere footnote, because this technology is an early first step to editing your own genome as a consenting adult instead of fiddling around with the genes of a fertilized egg and hoping you haven't screwed over a future person's life in the process.
If that is possible, then so is the forcible editing of genomes upon non-consenting adults, children, and infants. Welcome to the future.
Attention Baptist Preachers (Score:5, Funny)
Remember when you guys were claiming AIDS was a sent by God to punish homosexuals?
Well, it looks like maybe God wasn't as pissed off with them as you thought. Oopsie!
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There is NO justice. If I could mod you up for that, I definitely would!
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To a deity that managed to blink and miss 6 million Jews, 8,000 of your buddies is a pretty slow day at the office.
If you want to go around calling people fools, perhaps you should start with that drooling jackoff you see every time you look in a mirror.
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I wasn't aware that God provided a "Get Out of Hell Free" card. I'm pretty sure there's a number of places in the bible that talk about eternal damnation.
So yeah, I think that fits a LOT of people's understanding of God...including God's understanding of God, if you take the bible literally.
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Truly ROFL!!! Thanks for that!
And the cost.... (Score:1)
is sure to be staggering....
Just when you though the drug companies cared more about lives than profit... ROFL ;-)
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In a few years, the cost will be $10 plus a flight to Mexico.
Or $10,000,000 if you want the treatment America.
Ob. link (Score:3)
Ob. link to the song CRISPR-Cas9 [youtube.com]
Efficient delivery of CRISPR remains THE challenge (Score:4, Informative)
several issues remain to be addressed prior to clinical trials. While an AAV serotype with broad tropism is ideal for proof-of-concept studies, replication competent HIV is rare (present only in one of every 10,000 to 1,000,000 CD4+ T cells), and thus identifying delivery vectors with high specificity to the HIV reservoir remains a significant hurdle. There is currently no known viral or non-viral agent that is capable of efficiently and selectively delivering and expressing transgenes in these cells. An ideal delivery candidate should possess the ability to carry a relatively large cargo to relevant reservoir cells and facilitate pharmacologically significant enzymatic activity. It should also exhibit little to no toxicity irrespective of the duration of its presence in vivo, whether transient or long term.
(emphasis mine)
Still, this is a very encouraging development toward a possible HIV cure.
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This isn't the first time researchers have used gene editing to tackle HIV infection. There is a clinical trial [nejm.org] involving a
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Yeah, there's
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You're twice as stupid as you think you are.