From I-base.info
http://i-base.info/htb/28625
In the second plenary, long-time HIV positive activist Matt Sharp, expanded on cure research from a personal perspective from early involvement in community responses in San Francisco in the 1980s through to achieving five year follow-up after having been an early participant in the first zinc finger nuclease-based gene therapy safety study: while his CD4 cells have doubled, there is little understand of the clinical implications and ageing takes him into unchartered waters as a subject for research.
Diagnosed in 1988 and recently having celebrated his 60th birthday, Matt gave a calm, steady and sober evaluation of being part of a community response that included fellow activists Martin Delaney (in whose name much of the US public cure research programme is named after) and Bob Munk, the popular long-time activist whose death in the week before the conference left many of us saddened after a long and inspiring fight against progressively debilitating HIV-related complications
The plenary talk on approaches to engineering T cells was given by James Riley from the University of Pennsylvania who stressed the potential for gene therapy to improve on CD4 responses which in the context of cure research will need to be sustained for decades if ART is to be stopped.
In addition to the history of this field from early studies in 1996 that included antisense molecules targeting integrated proviral DNA, this talked focused on the use of zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) and Sangamo compound SB-728 that modifies and reinfuses CD4 cells to carry CCR5 deletions.
A new compound C34 is building on this technology with the aim of producing a greater percentage of HIV resistant cells with the hope that this will have a greater impact on viral suppression.
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