Nobel prizewinner plans to launch genetic engineering project to fight AIDS
Nobel Prize Winner Dr David Baltimore wants to establish a new institution to
use genetic engineering in the war against AIDS, delegates heard at the
conference on the Social, Ethical, Legal, Educational, Bio-Medical and
Bio-Technological Implications of the Human Genome Project, hosted by the
African Genome Initiative, at Spier, near Stellenbosch this month.
He has called for the relaxation of requirements that vaccination procedures
stimulate naturally available immunity and that scientists commit themselves to
genetically designing an "immunity protein".
In a paper delivered on his behalf at the conference, he said attempts to set
up an antibody vaccine to prevent AIDS infection had not yet been successful.
According to Baltimore, two main approaches to set up an antibody vaccine had
been used to date, both of which attempted to boost the body's natural immunity.
But both had so far failed because of the "notoriously mutable" nature
of the HIV virus.
"Intriguingly, there was an apparent effectiveness in subgroups of black
and Asian Americans but that the numbers were so small that it is highly
unlikely that this is an indication of effectiveness".
"The third approach is to say that natural immunity is too limited for
our needs; we need to augment it with modern-day genetic engineering".
Dr Baltimore believes that ideally a highly protective antibody can be
developed that will block infection, be efficient against all HIV strains and
mutations, and have no side-effects.
"Actually we don't care if it is a real antibody, it can be an antibody
derivative that has all the right properties. Let me call it an 'immunity
protein'".
He said that the immune system could be engineered to make the proposed
protein through gene therapy. Experiments to date with mice had shown that
lentivirus vectors or "lentivectors" had successfully carried genes
into their systems and that these had lasted for several generations.
"We should be able to design a lentivector that can encode the immunity
protein and use it to implant into immune cell precursors the ability to make
the proposed protein. We would do this by mobilizing the bone marrow stem
cells".
Dr Baltimore concedes that it will be prohibitively expensive and too
technologically intensive for Third World countries to initiate. It would
therefore have to be developed in the First World and packaged cheaply in order
to be accessible to as many people as possible.
"It will not be truly successful unless we can solve the logistical
problems that make it an expensive procedure and have it available to the whole
world".
Dr Baltimore said he was in the process of trying to set up such a non-profit
organization at Caltech that would develop the project using government and
philanthropic funding.
Courtesy of the African Human Genome Initiative
More information: http://www.africagenome.co.za/
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