Yesterday, the best news which has ever come out during my lifetime, did. There's going to finally be an HIV cure. It's a ways down the road, but this all but guarantees it.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-treatment-based-gene-safely-effectively.html
Here's the original paper explaining what was done in detail. Again, it's going to be a few more years before this is on the shelf, but there's finally hope for the end of HIV.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-023-00410-4
Here's one of the two papers where the technology germinated about a decade ago. Note that the last paper was SIV instead of HIV, but it's such a good model, it almost always translates to humans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2647
Here's the other one. If you don't like reading original source materials like this, or want to read the first announcement with the details on the good news, I'll sum up...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2623
This is a gene therapy which inactivates HIV/SIV by entering the virus itself and editing the genome. This is cool in and of itself, but it is meaningful because it does a thing called "draining the viral reservoir". This is what makes it a cure and not just a treatment.
The reason why you can only suppress, and not eradicate viruses, is because they will go into a dormant state and hang out for years and then re-deploy, and you're back where you started.
This is why, as amazing as antivirals are, you're generally stuck taking them forever.
This is also why Sovaldi is such a big deal: it actually *cures* Hepatitis C, which previously was only treatable. You take it (along with other things) for twelve weeks, and at the end you are free of the virus. This is a first. No other cures for viruses exist.
And now there's a method to drain the viral reservoir and inactivate HIV. And this isn't just the best news of my lifetime, but it also paves the way for therapies to cure Hep B, and any number of others.
I am so excited, so happy, so hopeful.
✨💖✨
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