Went to an interesting seminar today, an update on HIV vaccines and such.... had to laugh about jokers like NNVC.
What an incredible pathogen, just keeps getting stronger and more formidable all the time. There are now I believe about 8 known distinct varieties, or clades. But even these are more or less general classes. The distinctions are so blurred they don't even talk about being infected with a virus anymore, they call it a "swarm", because multiple clades frequently infect the same individual and combine and recombine with one another in numerous ways, and rather rapidly too. Replication rate is unbelievably fast (10 billion/day), and the things that target the virus coat are hopelessly misguided because there's no one specific viral "coat". So much for NNVC's "guided missile" approach. What in God's name do you target? Whatever you target, you can be sure in an hour the target will have changed. Mutates unbelievably fast also, and combines and recombines constantly. Of course, the major problem is not the virus in the bloodstream, so even if you somehow eradicate that, you have accomplished little, because the swarm of viral genomes have become entrenched, hidden away amongst the host genome in different places in cells that may often be entirely normal in every other way and therefore indistinguishable from non-infected cells.
The basic conclusion: current vaccine approaches have not worked worth beans, and can't possibly work. An entirely new approach is needed. Again... that leads me back to Benitec. What a brilliant strategy, and to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing else out there that is even remotely close. A lentiviral vector contains a construct with a ribozyme that takes down CCR5, the co-receptor required for HIV entry into cells. The vector also contains constructs encoding dsRNA that targets the critical viral proteins tat and rev, and takes them down via the RNA interference pathway. A third construct encodes a TAR RNA decoy, which tat binds to and is required for replication and transcription of the viral genome.
They transfect this into the patient's own (noninfected) hematopoietic stem cells, ablate the bone marrow, engraft the stem cells, which then repopulate all lymphocytes populations (and splenic and lymph node populations, etc.), replacing the old cells (now killed with irradiation of chemically) with engineered cells that are highly resistant to infection, but if infected, prevent viral replication by interfering with transcription and by knocking down tat and rev both. So even if cells get infected (unlikely, but possible), the virus can't incorporate or replicate. Nice... two layers of redundancy, and the effects turn out to be more than additive, they are synergistic.
All this is well studied and tested now in cell culture and animal models both, and openly published in excellent peer-reviewed journals, all there for anybody to see who cares to.
Compare an operation like this to a 2-bit fly-by-night popsicle stand like NNVC who have no clear technology, no published anything, just a vague, dumbed-down description of some imagined "technology" that is sophomoric and absurdly unworkable even if it does exist, which is highly doubtful.
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