Curing AIDS with CRISPR: Breakthrough in Genetic Technology

2024-03-25 14:17:41

#Dutch scientists successfully eliminated the AIDS virus using genetic technology#[#genemagicpen successfully eliminated the AIDS virus#]According to a report on the British “New Scientist” weekly website on March 19, a new method to eliminate the AIDS virus from the body It might one day become a cure for this viral infection, although it has yet to be proven effective in humans.

The strategy uses a relatively new genetic technology called CRISPR, which cuts DNA to introduce damaging information into the viral genetic material within immune cells.

“This finding represents a critical advance toward designing treatment strategies,” Elena Bootilla Calirou, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said in a statement.

Although HIV infection used to be almost always fatal, people living with HIV now have access to drugs that stop the virus from replicating. This will give them a near-normal life expectancy, as long as they consistently take the medication every day.

But when people are first infected, part of the virus embeds its DNA into the patient’s immune cells, where it remains latent. If a patient stops taking HIV drugs, this part of the DNA will “reawaken” and the HIV virus will begin to spread throughout the immune system once more.

To be cured, we need to have some way of killing any lurking virus in the body. Scientists have tried a variety of strategies, but so far none have been found to be effective.

The latest approach uses CRISPR gene-editing technology. The editing technique, first discovered in bacteria, tracks a specific DNA sequence and makes cuts at it. By altering the DNA sequence being targeted, the technology might potentially be translated into gene therapy to treat a variety of diseases. Last year, the United States and Britain became the first to approve such treatments as a treatment for sickle cell anemia.

Several research teams are studying the use of CRISPR editing technology, which targets a gene in the HIV virus, as a way to disable the latent virus. Now, Carrillo and her team have shown that, when tested on immune cells in a dish, their CRISPR system can disable all viruses, allowing them to be cleared from those cells. The research will be presented next month at the European Conference on Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

Jonathan Stoyer of the Francis Crick Institute in the UK said the findings were encouraging but would need to be tested in animals and eventually humans to prove the treatment might reach all carriers. Immune cells harboring latent HIV. Some of these cells are thought to be found in the bone marrow, but they may also be found in other parts of the body, he said. “There is still considerable uncertainty regarding whether there are additional storage sites for immune cells elsewhere in the body,” he said.

A biopharmaceutical company in California has previously demonstrated that a CRISPR-based method can reduce the amount of latent virus in monkeys infected with a certain type of HIV-like virus.

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