June’s team tried a new gene therapy approach, first crippling the HIV virus, they report in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"The virus is gutted so that it only has half the size of the original or pathogenic virus," June said in a telephone interview.
ANTISENSE APPROACH
The so-called envelope gene remains, and is reversed, a manipulation called antisense.
The researchers then recruited five patients with HIV who were beginning to fail treatment, meaning the drugs no longer worked and the virus was beginning to damage their immune systems.
June’s team removed the immune cells, CD4 T-cells, that are attacked by HIV. The researchers infected the CD4 cells in the lab with their newly engineered antisense HIV virus, then infused them back onto the patients.
When HIV or any other virus infects a cell, it injects its own genetic material into the cell. The cell is turned into a virus factory, sometimes pumping out thousands of copies of a virus before it explodes.
After the new antisense virus was infused, newly infected cells pumped out defective virus, June said.
