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  • Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) reduces the amount of CD4 cells (T cells)

  • T cells are used to fight off infections in the immune system

  • Reducing the amount of T cells, weakens the body’s ability to fight off diseases 

  • When HIV infects the T cell, the virus inserts its genome into the DNA of the cell, which causes the DNA replication system to produce viral copies

  • 1.2 million people in the United States are infected with HIV

  • 36.7 million people in the world are infected with HIV 

  • Global wide issue since the late 1970’s.

  • Once someone is infected with HIV, they have it for the rest of their life.  

What is HIV?

There is no cure for HIV. Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) is being used to control the disease. The therapy consists of several medications that need to be taken daily. Although it lowers the number of viruses replicated, it is not an ideal solution to the problem. The issue with this treatment is that it can be difficult for some to take the medications every day for their entire life. Some even have trouble accessing the drugs or have terrible side effects from the drugs that make them less likely to take them. If the person doesn’t take the medication, the virus will eventually reactivate and cause the cells to rapidly divide again.

Photo courtesy of Normal Breathing

What is Currently Being Done?

Why is There No Cure?

HIV has been a difficult disease to defeat for three reasons:

  1. It attacks the T cells that are used to fight off diseases in the immune system.

  2. The cells rapidly replicate, which makes it difficult to control if no medications are being used. Even mutations can arise causing resistance to medicine.

  3. Once the cell is infected with the viral DNA, the cell can’t get rid of it. 

  • CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats

  • Repeated segments of DNA are followed by spacer DNA, which comes from previous exposure to a virus 

  • Cas9 is an enzyme that can recognize specific sequences in DNA using RNA to guide it and cut it like scissors

  • Current research on human embryos has been restricted from receiving funding from the NIH due to safety concerns of CRISPR and for ethical reasons

  • CRISPR is being used to either stop the viral cells from replicating or removing the viral DNA and genome from the cell

What is CRISPR?

Photo Courtesy of Medical Literature Society at UCLA

Find Out How Genome Editing Could Cure Diseases like HIV

Video Courtesy of YouTube: Future of Medicine
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