important hiv news

[mellowtigger]

Two important genetic discoveries announced today.

1) It's happened before with TRIM5 gene

Monkeys have, more than once, evolved a genetic defense to lentiviruses (which includes HIV). "An intriguing possibility is that the newly formed genes prevented infection by prehistoric viruses related to modern AIDS viruses. If so, this could mean that AIDS-like epidemics are not unique to our time, but in fact may have plagued our primate ancestors long before the modern AIDS epidemic. " Which, if their idea is correct, means that we can definitively beat this epidemic this time, since it's been done multiple times before by nature.

2) It's happening now with TRIM22 gene

Researchers find a gene that can prevent a cell from assembling more copies of HIV.  "This means that TRIM22 is an essential part of our body's ability to fight off HIV. The results are very exciting because they show that our bodies have a gene that is capable of stopping the spread of HIV."

Good to hear.  :)

Comments

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Well, patient recruitment is a very tricky thing in studies like this, and I can't say that in any study I've been involved in there would be any role for people walking in off the street. The problem is that people self-select in ways that results in a set that is not representative of the target population. This is OK for certain kinds of qualitative, exploration-driven work, but it greatly undermines the statistical power of quantitative case/control studies.

Also, while I'm at it, by far the most interesting HIV work I've seen lately has been this RNAi screen (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/science/11hiv.html) that identified a whole lot more ways HIV can potentially be attacked. It will be quite a while before it translates into therapy, but the wealth of knowledge generated by this experiment is unprecedented.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

I see your point - but how the heck do they find people to study?!

Seems like there should be some kind of registry for people willing to participate in a study - and if they match the kind of profile a particular study needs, then they can be contacted.

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Oh, believe me, it's a royal PITA. Ideally, you get them from medical records and track them down in person, or use samples that were collected for some other purpose. Because of complicated privacy and consent issues and the need to satisfy the research boards, the costs are thousands of dollars per patient. (JUST for recruitment.)

At work, we greatly underestimated this problem and found ourselves all dressed up and ready to go - we spent >100M to create the best, most cost-effective genomic screening technology in the world, but ended up without enough human subjects to do the studies we wanted to do with it. And the people who did have patients to work with didn't want to share credit with us by using our services. Nearly killed the company.