A study of the genetic determinants of HIV viral load in 3,879 people of African ancestries has found what is claimed to be the only new variant related to HIV infection discovered in more than two decades of research into how host genomics affects the response to the retrovirus.
Fifteen years ago, at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), researchers announced that they had cured a patient – Timothy Ray Brown, initially known only as the Berlin Patient to preserve his privacy – of HIV through a hematopoietic stem cell transplant. Now, as researchers are gathered in Seattle for CROI 2023, reports of another cured patient were published Feb. 20, 2023, in Nature Medicine. Ten years after receiving a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, and 4 years after stopping antiretroviral treatment (ART), a 53-year-old patient may have been cured of HIV infection.
Results published Feb. 17, 2023, in Immunity have given a wider view of what happens in the earliest stages of HIV infection. Treatments against HIV prevent the replication of the virus, but do not kill the reservoir of latently infected cells that starts to build almost immediately upon infection.
At the 2022 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), investigators reported on a fourth patient who has achieved HIV remission after a stem cell transplant. The patient is the first woman and the first mixed-race person to achieve HIV remission through a transplant procedure. In 2017, she was transplanted with cord blood stem cells lacking a functional CCR5 receptor, which prevents HIV from entering cells.
BEIJING – Chinese scientist He Jiankui has been sentenced to three years in prison and fined ¥3 million (US$429,421) for illegally carrying out the human embryo gene editing that led to the birth of twin girls and another baby with heritable changes to their genomes.
LONDON – A paper that raised concerns for the future health of Lulu and Nana, the world's first gene edited babies, has been fully retracted at the request of the authors, after they failed to identify a problem in data from the U.K. Biobank on which their analysis was based.