Transplant success reignites interest in reprogramming cells against HIV

Nature Medicine

Image: greyloch

Last week, researchers took a small but significant step forward in the battle against HIV. A person named in public only as the ‘London patient’ has apparently been left free of the virus after a bone marrow transplant for a form of blood cancer. The announcement — made jointly at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington, and in a Nature paper¹ — came with the caveat that the procedure is too risky and expensive to adopt widely for treatment of HIV. However, it has also sparked new interest in a technique to combat the virus by reprogramming the human immune system using gene-editing technology. Read more on the Nature Medicine news site…