Hope for Cure of H.I.V.

A disease that no one wants.  One that can rip you apart and tear you into pieces by making one stupid decision. Doctors have been searching for a cure ever since the first case. Until recently, the possibility for HIV/AIDS seemed more or less wishful thinking. But two patients experiences have changed doctors mind.

It is clear that doctors mind-sets have changed over the years on this topic. It says in the article “New Hope for a Cure for H.I.V.” from New York Times, that “There were attempts in the past to cure the disease, but most experts thought it more feasible to focus on prevention and treatment.”  But doctors have backed off a little bit on finding a cure considering that antiviral drugs have turned the H.I.V. infection from a near-certain death sentence to a chronic disease. I don't think that taking drugs everyday of your life is a great way to live compared to the alternative, but doctors are saying that they don't have the resources to get this drug out to the tens of million people infected. Which leaves the only other option, finding a cure.

Recently, a 50- year old man went through a gene therapy procedure. “While he was not cured, his body was able to briefly control the virus after he stopped taking the usual antiviral drugs, something that is highly unusual. Although it was not a cure, it lead doctors to new research. They looked at this disease in a new way, one that may have been abstract. Doctors still can't imagine or understand about the possibility of them thinking they can do it. It hasn't been done before. But everything had to be done for a first time.

Hope for a cure was raised by the experience of an American man named Timothy Brown , who was getting two bone marrow transplants to treat his leukemia. “The donor was among the 1 percent of Northern Europeans naturally resistant to H.I.V. infection because they lack CCR5, a protein on the surface of immune cells that the virus uses as an entry portal.” When his own immune system replaced by one resistant to the infection, Timothy Brown was able to live 4 years free of the virus. But bone marrow transplant is really risky and expensive, and  finding "immunologically matching donor, let alone one with mutations in both copies of the CCR5 gene." So doctors have been inspired to modify the patients own immune cells to make them resistant to the infection by elimination CCR5.

Everything started at some point. Everything in the world started at one particular moment and hasn't stopped since, weather it be yesterday or 10 million years ago. Things may have evolved and gotten better, but they are essentially the same. The clock hasn't started ticking yet for this virus, but the starting whistle is just about to be blown.