AIDS Cured By Adult Stem Cell Transplant?

I honestly did not see this one coming -- I assumed that embryonic stem cells would be where we got our cures, partly because that was what scientists claimed, but mostly because that's how life usually works: It makes you choose between one good and another. It makes you make hard choices. It doesn't usually allow a technological end-around the problem.

In this case, it turns out that's exactly the case, though. It's not embryonic cells producing cures; it's the non-controversial adult ones. One thing, though, is that this seems to be only a lab-experiment cure, not a practical one.

Timothy Ray Brown, an HIV-positive American living in Germany, had leukemia and was undergoing chemotherapy, when he received a transplant of stem cells from a donor carrying a rare, inherited gene mutation that seems to make carriers virtually immune to HIV infection.

The transplant appeared to wipe out both diseases, giving hope to doctors, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been studying HIV/AIDS for almost 30 years, said while this is an interesting proof of concept, it’s absurdly impractical.

“It’s hard enough to get a good compatible match for a transplant like this,” Fauci told FoxNews.com, “But you also have to find compatible donor that has this genetic defect, and this defect is only found in 1 percent of the Caucasian population and zero percent of the black population. This is very rare.”

1% seems to be a fair amount to me, actually. I'm sure you could pay hobos with this defect $100 a skin-scraping. Maybe they do have a use for society after all, aside from pleasure-hunting.

posted by Ace at 06:42 PM

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