Dec 14 2010Medical Miracles: Stem Cells Cure Man's HIV?

hello i yam furst furst!

So if ya' stab (inject) someone with flower they're cured?

Did I make you laugh GW?

GW fail. Stem cells are not from stems... *facepalm* They are taken from human bone marrow. Maybe you should have read the article that's linked on gawker before posting this here.

wrong stem cells.... those stems just help the plants grow

I guess "play on words" doesn't get to to many folks. :\

@4 helper guy...... I'm pretttttttty sure GW knows the difference but thanks for straightening that out for anyone else out who might be confused with the subject and the picture

Oh GW, please tell me that you were trying to make a joke and failed as opposed to being serious and just failing harder.

@6 to say the least.... I was being sarcastic @5 until I read @4
3
2
1
blast-offf!

What the... fails @ getting joke you suck at life......just kidding....no i'm not.

Yeah I'm pretty sure GW was being witty with the "stem" semantics.

But yes, all joking aside... holy ****, this is freaking HUGE news. The implications of this are just incredible; the idea that stem cell treatment really could have the miraculous potential that supporters have always claimed just *blows my mind.* I mean, I have Crohn's, which is also considered incurable. Does this mean that could possibly change as well?

Wow. Just... wow.

i didn't realize there were people on the planet who were hiv resistant. that is the big news in this tiny article to me.

You know what blows MY mind?

(this is begging for a punch line)

It's fascinating, the uni I work for actually published a study about this about 5 years ago, not this man in specific but that they were studying protein receptors in the body. It seems that many people of direct European descent have a natural resistance to the most common form of HIV, not immunity but resistance. Their research determined that it was the body's natural evolution immune response to peoples that were descendent of Black Plague survivors, because the plague used the same method of attachment to the proteins. This is the first known instance of resistant stem cells introduced to the body actually outweighing the dead cells, thus curing his HIV infection. Amazing research.

The more you know. ::star wipe::

@12 yeah I just heard about that a few months ago. Some small percentage of people, and I think they've even identified the exact gene that gives them immunity.

Wonder if anyone is immune to the flu?

@ all the morons yelling at GW, maybe you should read the post tags ;)

Reminds of the movie The Cure starring Joeseph Mazzelo as a boy with AIDS and his Friend trying to find a cure using plants from the bayou.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure_%281995_film%29

Money works too.

@25 & 16
To add to that, in the same study it also goes to explain why people of African decent are more susceptible to contracting HIV, but on that same note they also have a resistance to malaria.

needs more gay sex

and more corrections from idiots who don't get the joke

A cure; sweet! I'm going whoring

It's been known for many years that a percentage of the European population have resistance to HIV. Blood transfusions from that 1% have already proven to significantly reduce infected cells, so a marrow transplant would naturally have an increased effect. The reason this article is getting play is that it was an accident. Since there are so few people with the resistance genes and it takes 4-6 weeks to replenish said marrow--not to mention the cost of transportation, surgery, and so forth--it will be awhile before this becomes a major solution to HIV.

@dishy People are immune to old versions of the flu they've contracted. The reason the flu crops up every year is that it mutates rapidly, so each year it's a new variant flu that we contract. Since you can't be immune to something you (or your ancestors) have never encountered, no one will be permanently immue to the flu. At least not naturally.

For the geneticists and others who care: People homozygous for a mutation in CCR5 (specifically the delta 32 mutation), first identified in a small percentage of Irish folks and now known to be found in a small percentage of most European races (we're talking 1-2% here) are resistant to infection by HIV.

CCR5 is one of the main proteins that HIV uses to enter cells. Having two slightly screwed-up copies of it makes it so that HIV can't attach to cells in order to infect them.

If you have HIV and find yourself in need of a stem-cell transplant for some other reason (like say, having leukemia), and if you can find a donor who matches you AND happens to be homozygous for the CCR5 mutation, then you can maybe get rid of your HIV, as seems to have happened in this case report. However, as you may have noticed, that's a lot of ifs.

Not surprisingly, finding a willing, matching donor who happens to be a homozygote for CCR5 delta 32 is not possible for most people with HIV. For this particular case, it took them screening forty-odd people who have CCR5 delta 32 to find one who matched this guy well enough to chance the transplant. And that was "lucky." On top of that, stem cell transplants have a pretty high morbidity (look up "graft vs. host disease") and mortality--true, lower than the mortality of HIV/AIDS, but still a pretty risky procedure.

Still, as far as I know, this represents the first identified "cure" of a patient with HIV.

@22 if this is the same study I read a couple weeks ago (Hütter et al, NEJM 2009), it was not an accident--they screened a whole bunch of potential donors to find an HLA identical donor homozygous at the CCR5 position.

...

ADULT stem-cells, FWIW.

And i'm pretty sure if you transplanted plant cells into someone's bone marrow, they would turn into Swamp Thing.

BTW- Linking to an article that simply links to the actual article? Super lazy blogging! But that's the Geekologie way!

@4 apparently you are not familiar with GW's humor. Stem cells... plant stems... get it? GET IT?!?!?!? he is a genius. instead of Geekologie Writer, GW should stand for Genius Writer.

LOOK AT GEEKOLOGIE WRITERS TAGS PEOPLES!!!!!!!

Dissing GW FAIL!!!!!!!!!

@ 14 and 23 for sure the news has been out for a while, but fascinating and totally logical about the black plague! So cool! I am going to look this up right now!

@ 25... maybe you are on to something!!!

@ 4

Not only from bone marrow, bro!

There are two types embryonic (from an embryo) and adult stem cells.. they are found all over the body, not just bone marrow - ie, mammary glands, nasal passage (yeah for real), the brain... etc!

Cheerios!

have they figured out how to clone stem cells yet, this has a lot of potential

This is a tragedy, people. Remember: God kills a kitten every time someone is cured of HIV.

And stem cell research makes Baby Jesus cry.

The Lord is only happy when humans are wallowing in pain & misery.

This is a great accomplishment. I'm glad we are closer to a cure for HIV/AIDS...

Now, to be a downer - as soon as we cure AIDS, Cancer, Heart Disease, Parkinsons, Alzheimer's, etc... They will be replaced by new diseases. This is the circle of life and mother nature is an innovative bitch...

OMG STEM CELLS ARE SO BAD RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE

+1 for the medical community.

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One of the comments on the host’s site under the article is a theist immediately calling evolutionary biology a "Belief" while praising science for this discovery at the same time.... I love (hate) it when people who don’t even have the slightest clue about the subject feel the need to chime in with there "Opinion"... Little does the guy know without the contributions of evolutionary biology and Genetics this medical discovery would not have been found. Jack asses, all of them I swear.

Soo... when is Will Smith gonna show up???

"German man with leukemia (that's pretty cruel, God)" - That made me laugh so much. I guess that is bad, huh?

30:
Don't have a link for it, but recently new info on the ability of regular blood cells to be changed into stem cells and the stem cells back works, but only on adult stem cells. ESC will not transmute so easily.