Doctors Find Success Using Retooled HIV to Fight Leukemia
Worldwide, Daily news | ankakh | December 12, 2012 0:04
In April, Emma Brooke Whitehead’s leukemia seemed unbeatable.
Emma, a 6-year-old from Phillipsburg, Pa., had been fighting the disease for nearly two years and doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said there were no standard treatments left. So they took a gamble on a new, potentially groundbreaking treatment — using HIV.
They removed millions of Emma’s disease-fighting white blood cells and used genetically altered HIV — a virus that easily gets into human immune systems — to turn Emma’s cells into a kind of immunological “directed missile,” specifically programmed to destroy the leukemia cells. The cells were then returned to Emma’s body.
“All of the things that make the HIV virus able to cause disease have been removed from this particular virus whose only purpose is to put a gene into a cell,” said Dr. Stephan Grupp, a pediatric oncologist at CHOP who uses HIV to infiltrate the immune system. “There is no danger of infection and there is no longer the HIV virus.”
She has no leukemia in her body for any test that we can do — even the most sensitive tests,” he said. “We need to see that the remission goes on for a couple of years before we think about whether she is cured or not. It is too soon to say.”
Facebook
Tweet This
RSS Feed
Email This Post
Loading ...
