Saturday, August 15, 2015

Recap of Fred Hutch CGT4HIVCURE conference / Great news for Matt Sharp (5 years after treatment)

Matt Sharp veteran AIDS activist was treated with Sangamo's SB-728-T in 2010. He is still reaping the benefits.

Matt Sharp who has been living with HIV since 1988, is an example of that benefit. In 2010, he took part in a small clinical trial in San Francisco, one of the first to test gene therapy for HIV. His blood was drawn and his T cells were filtered out and genetically engineered to have the CCR5 mutation, then returned to his body. The goal of the trial was simply to see if altering and returning the genes worked and could be done safely, but Sharp received an unexpected benefit: His persistently low T-cell count more than doubled and remains high, relieving him of the regular bouts of pneumonia he used to suffer despite being on antiretroviral therapy.
One of Friday’s presenters, Dr. Joumana Zeidan, a postdoctoral research fellow from Case Western Reserve University, presented an analysis of that San Francisco trial, saying that the single infusion of CCR5-modified T cells helped shrink the reservoir.
Sharp, who attended the conference, raised his hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “I was a participant in that trial. I’ve been waiting for six years to understand what happened.”  

Read the article here:






http://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2015/08/hiv-cure-research-today.html

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