9 | OutBoise Magazine | NEWS
Trimeq has become a true miracle drug for him.
Even as I write this new breakthroughs are in the
making. In 1998, my partner was diagnosed with
AIDS. Before his diagnosis we didn’t even know he
was positive. Due to our long term intimate relationship and our sexual practices we assumed I
would test positive. I did not. My partners physician
was shocked once he learned about our sexual
history. He had me tested again, and then a third
time. All tests came back negative. After learning
this, he referred me to a study being conducted
at Vanderbilt University Hospital of people with
known multiple exposures, who did not become
HIV positive.
I went every month, was tested, gave blood
samples and was examined. I participated in the
study for 10 years. Vanderbilt was developing a
vaccine for testing, and also began doing DNA
testing. They took exhaustive family and sexual histories of me, and also obtained blood from both
of my parents. I reported every sexual contact I
had to them.
At the end of my participation in the study they
informed me that I had a rare genetic makeup
where I had two copies of a specific gene. That
meant I lacked a cell receptor known as CCR5,
making me
essentially immune.The finding of this genetic
anomaly in me and a few other people in 2002
led to the development of a new type of treatment.
The drug Maraviroc was FDA approved in 2007
and worked using the CCR5 inhibitor studies by
blocking the HIV from entering the cell through
the CCR5 receptor, which was the most common
route for HIV to enter a cell. The CCR5 studies hold
promise as a possible route for a cure through
means of genetic engineering and splicing. These
treatment possibilities are still under study at the
present time.
There are other cure options on the horizon
as well. In 2008, a man named Timothy Brown
underwent a radiation and chemotherapy to
OutBoise.com | Issue 4.2 | February 2015
kill his bone marrow while being treated for
Leukemia,and then was given a transplant of
bone marrow from a donor who was HIV immune
because of their lack of CCR5 receptors. In one
fell swoop Brown was cured of his Leukemia and
was cured of HIV infection! He is as of now the
only patient known to be fully cured of infection.
His treatment offers great hope of a cure. The cure
is not at this time practical for large scale use due
to the lack of HIV immune donors. It is estimated
that only 1 percent of the caucasian population
carries two copies of the gene in question.
With world wide population taken into account,
that is one in 70 million people. There just are not
enough donors to make the treatment practical
on a wide scale. In 2014, Researchers at Temple
University for the first time were able to remove the
HIV virus from human cells. The team headed by
Kamel Khalili PhD professor and chair of Neuroscience at Temple and his colleague Dr. Wenhui Hu
led the work by developing molecular tools to
permanently delete the HIV virus from DNA. From
there the cells repair machinery takes over attaching the loose ends of the genome back together
resulting in virus free cells.
This in lab work is a huge step in the direction of
a cure. Actual human trials are still a long way off
but this breakthrough is the first step in the direction of a practical cure. As time goes on new
drugs, new treatments and new channels of research will continue to present themselves. The astonishing conclusion here is the unbelievably rapid
progress made in the area if HIV treatment. To
the HIV positive it may seem unbearably slow, but
from a medical and research standpoint, taking
HIV infection from being a disease that kills within
two years to a treatable chronic disease in only a
34 year time span is incredible! Consider this, diabetes is first mentioned in a manuscript in 1500 BC
and an effective treatment was not developed
until 1921-22. The unprecedented speed with
wh