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A Breakthrough Cure for AIDS

Sijia Zhao

Dr. Alyssa Karow

October 15, 2019

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It is a common knowledge that AIDS is one of the most formidable diseases that the

world has faced in the past century. Primarily caused by HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency

Virus, the disease has afflicted more than 37.9 million people around the world as of 2018

(HIV.Gov, 2019). In a more personal level, one of the reasons why AIDS is deadly is because it

causes the human’s immune system to weaken down, which makes it highly vulnerable to

disease-causing organisms thereby significantly increasing the chances of mortality.

In a 2018 study conducted by Jacobson and Khalili (2018), the authors reviewed the new

possible treatments against the disease, which includes “therapeutic immunization, alterations of

immunoregulatory pathways, anti-HIV-1 antibodies, and anti-HIV-1 chimeric antigen receptor

T-lymphocytes”. These new treatments are in line with a recent “accidental” discovery whereby a

patient being treated for myelocytic leukemia was also cured for AIDS upon being “allogeneic

stem cell transplants from a CCR5 Δ32 homozygous donor” (Berlin Patient). Although being a

single case, this accident led to subsequent research that seeks the many ways to utilize stem cell

treatments to cure what was once a seemingly incurable disease.

All in all, the author of this article believes that the discovery of the ‘Berlin Patient’ is

one of the reasons for the reinvigoration of current efforts to cure AIDS. For decades, most

efforts have led to a detour that caused most scientists and healthcare professionals to prefer

palliative treatments that only mitigate the resulting symptoms of the disease. However, this also

led to an explosive increase of the number of new cases all over the world. Therefore, this

increases the significance of these new potential technologies as against the band-aid solutions

that existed before.

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References

HIV.Gov. (2019, July 31). The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic. Retrieved from HIV.Gov:

https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/global-statistics

Jacobson, J. M., & Khalili, K. (2018). Toward the Cure of HIV-1 Infection: Lessons Learned and

Yet to be Learned as New Strategies are Developed. AIDS reviews, 20(4), 220-225.