Seattle Children's Researchers Pioneer Gene Editing That Kills, Resists HIV.

A team of researchers from the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapy at Seattle Children's Research Institute led by Dr. David Rawlings and Dr. Andrew Scharenberg have published their work in which they have discovered a means of creating T cells that could combat infected HIV T cells and B cell tumors while also being immune to HIV infection. The success rate of this new study is what makes it significantly ground breaking. The researchers have used gene editing to accomplish this experiment. In the picture above, the left is an image of a clump of HIV infected T cells, and to the right is an image of it after it was introduced to the edited T cells which are attacking the infected cells.

Within genetics, researchers often use techniques to find cures to diseases by editing a gene to cause certain behaviors in the cell or to block a gene that directly causes a disease. In HIV, T cells are attacked, which is why the immune system is so greatly compromised in such patients. Out of the 30,000 genes that code for T cells, Dr. Rawlings and Dr. Scharenberg pinpointed one particular gene that coded for a receptor called CCR5. In a very precise method, they cut out this particular gene, so the HIV virus would have nothing to latch onto, making them immune to infection. Then, researchers replaced this segment with a genome sequence that would give the T cells ability to fight infected cells and B cell tumors. Dr. Rawlings notes of how distinctive the research is among others of its kind because of the fact that it had a 60% success rate. In other words, 60% of the time, researchers were successfully able to cut out the CCR5 gene, replace it with an edited sequence and simultaneously give the edited cells both the ability to resist HIV infection and fight infected cells.

They are still working on how this method would work in infected individuals. They would propose to take an individual's own T cells, edit them and place them back into the individual where they can reproduce and keep the patient protected for a long time, hopefully. I find it incredible how these scientists can almost master the dexterity it takes to accomplish the genetic editing. It would be a very bright future for affected individuals who get the diagnosis and experience the stigma attached to it. It may affect how we view the infection as well from something that used to be so deadly, to now how it is now considered "manageable," and towards the future where it may be combated successfully. It is hard to wrap around the idea that researchers can make changes in the genetic on such a microscopic scale. The fact that they can do this, and now with a very high success rate, will pave the way for cures of other autoimmune diseases and viruses.

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