Front Page Article on AIDS Cure Research--Go Paula Cannon!

Hey Paula--we'll call this a cure! Note that the photo was taken on July 16, 2010, when the rest of the AIDS world was at the Vienna AIDS Conference.


HIV-resistant cells work in mice. Can they help humans?
California scientists, boosted by stem cell research funding enabled by Proposition 71, are aiming for clinical trials involving gene therapy through bone marrow transplants.

Paula Cannon, a biology professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, inspects a mouse that will be infected with HIV. (Allen J. Schaben, Los Angeles Times / July 16, 2010)

By Rachel Bernstein, Los Angeles Times

August 21, 2010|6:44pm

Clad in a yellow gown, blue foot covers, hair net, face mask and latex gloves, Paula Cannon pushed open the door to the animal room. "I hate this smell," she said, wrinkling her nose.

The stink came from scores of little white mice scurrying about in cages. Some of the cages were marked with red biohazard signs, indicating mice that had been injected with HIV.

Yet, in some of the animals — ones with a small genetic change — the virus never took hold.

Like mouse, like man? Maybe so.

In early 2007, a patient in Berlin needed a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia. He was also HIV positive, and his doctor had an idea: Why not use the marrow from one of the rare individuals who are naturally resistant to HIV and try to eradicate both diseases at once?

It worked. Sixty-one days after the patient's transplant, his virus levels were undetectable, and they've stayed that way.

Since news of the man's cure broke, HIV patients have been telephoning doctors to ask for bone marrow transplants. But it's not that simple. The treatment is too risky and impractical for widespread use.

"A bone marrow transplant — it's a horrible process you would not wish on your worst enemy unless they needed one to save their life," said Cannon, a biology professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine. There are grueling treatments to prepare a patient for transplant; the danger of rejecting the marrow; and the risk of graft-versus-host disease, wherein the marrow attacks the patient.

And that's assuming the patient can find a matching donor — a difficult proposition in itself — with the right HIV-resistant genetic constitution, which is present in only about 1% of the Caucasian population.

But there could be another way.

Your Input: What would you like to ask top AIDS cure researchers?

Hi,

We're here at the two-day Reservoirs Workshop (HIV reservoirs is researcher talk for CURE research).

I'm here with the top AIDS cure researchers in the world. We have some good questions for them:

How much money are you spending to duplicate the Berlin Patient experiment?

How long will it be before we can try Paula Cannon's mice experiment in people?

What would you like to ask top AIDS *cure* researchers?

Like the Berlin Patient, except in a mouse, and easier to do.

This is based on information from Jules Levin (www.NATAP.org), who tracks all things AIDS and research.

Basically a California researcher named Paula Cannon has demonstrated that in a mouse, if you treat human stem cells (yes, they're using a mouse that's been engineered to have a human immune system) with a new zinc finger technology, you can disrupt CCR5, which is something that HIV needs to infect cells. The healthy stem cells then reproduce and spread into many kinds of uninfected immune cells. And you don't need to do this to a ton of cells, because these new HIV-free cells you are creating spread quickly. Similar to the Berlin Patient, (he got a special stem cell transplant from someone whose immune system naturally lacked CCR5) but at least in this mouse experiment, a complete stem cell transplantation isn't necessary. Also, if it works in humans, it's a "one shot thing." OK now, we are cooking with gas. Article was in press (and possibly out of reach of most other researchers) for 9 months. Bolding is mine.