The cure for HIV is notoriously elusive. For the past decade, an American named Timothy Brown was the only person thought to have ever been cleared of the virus following an innovative stem-cell transplant procedure. Today, a study published in the journal Nature suggests that there may have finally been a second.
In both cases, the patients received a chemotherapy treatment to combat their cancer, which entailed effectively scrubbing their immune system clean and revitalizing it with transplanted stem cells. Fortunately, the donor cells also carried a rare genetic mutation that causes HIV resistance, reports the MIT Technology Review. The most recent operation occurred nearly three years ago.
The term “cure” is contentious. Despite the compelling detail that the most recent patient, a London man who has asked to remain anonymous, hasn’t taken his antiretroviral drugs for HIV since September 2017, his doctors remain cautious about claiming that he’s been cured. Notably, both Brown and the London patient were being treated for cancer, not HIV. Though the new study suggests that Brown’s case was not an anomaly, doctors have unsuccessfully attempted the same procedure with other HIV patients.
The anonymous London patient’s procedures was similar to Brown’s. They both targeted CCR5, a protein receptor that the HIV virus exploits as an entrance to the immune system. Just one percent of people with Northern European heritage are born without CCR5 receptors, according to Vox, making them resistant to HIV. Between 2007 and 2008, Brown’s doctor Gero Hütter administered two bone marrow transplants from a donor who lacked CCR5 receptors. In 2009, Hütter published his findings demonstrating that Brown appeared to be HIV-free.
In the recent study, lead author Ravindra Gupta of University College London and his team followed Hütter’s protocol to treat the London patient’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
HIV and AIDS have had a crippling impact across the globe since it first appeared in the 1980s. The virus has killed some 35 million people, according to the World Health Organization. Some 37 million more currently suffer from the infection, which resulted in the death of 940,000 people in 2017 alone. Although doctors are apprehensive about calling the CCR5-targeted treatment a cure, the recent study is enough to give patients and physicians a glimmer of hope.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.