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Justsignedup·

Mrna vaccine techniques could be the next leap we needed to actually combat viruses.

Pretty amazing. I hope this ends up passing clinical trials soon.

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Crispr and plucky scientists are getting really close https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/08/herpes...

I’m looking forward to seeing progress on things like this and equivalent work on HPV (for the other HPV variants and the massive bulk of the population that either because of age or gender didn’t get the now widespread HPV vaccine)

It may not be a cure for HIV but it’s also the sort of thing that would be nice to eliminate from the variables at play in “healthy” that affect basically everything to do with medical science. Taking a few more variables out of the equations will hopefully make other things easier to study.

> It may not be a cure for HIV

CRISPR is most likely the cure for HIV as it can be used to modify embryonic DNA to create permanent immunity. That is actually what the first CRISPR embryo experiment tried to achieve a few years back in China.

I still remember the video with the doctor explaining what he had done. Made me feel in a gattaca-like sci-fi movie. Shame that governments try to stomp over such people instead of embracing innovation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc

I'm not familiar with CRISPR technology, but afik the issue with HIV is you would have to target some deep reservoir cells within adult humans whereas targeting embryo cells would be easier.

But I don't know how CRISPR is delivered to edit DNA in live cells.

CRISPR will not be used to cure HIV (not in the way experimented in China) because the same mutation that confers resistance to HIV makes people more susceptible to infections by influenza and West Nile virus and it is associated with autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s disease and type 1 diabetes

Why wait?

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