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by rms
5659 days ago
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They don't deserve a Nobel because the idea has been obvious in medicine for years. They just got very lucky in being able to deliver a confirmed CCR5 delta 32+ bone marrow transplant to someone with HIV in a medically responsible way. Curing HIV is an incredible thing to have accomplished but the confirmation of a successful surgery from 3 years ago doesn't advance the bounds of scientific knowledge as much as it was might seem when you see a story like this in the news. |
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What's your science background/what's your degree in? This really wasn't obvious. It was an open question as to whether or not other cells that were latently infected could produce a new infection via the other co-receptor (CXCR4).
> They just got very lucky
To characterize their hard work as luck is unjust. Yes, patients don't always survive bone marrow transplants, and this patient is indeed lucky to have survived. But the dilligent effort of his physicians is deliberate! Remember that they had to screen a lot of potential donors (61, I believe) to find someone with enough HLA similarity and a homozygous CCR5delta32 genotype. You can call this luck, but it's really just hard and dilligent work. Out of a pool of around 60 million people (worldwide) homozygous for CCR5delta32, you can find someone with enough matching allotypes. (You do know that you don't need all of the allotypes to match, right? That increases the probablity right there. In some cases, a little imperfect matching is a good thing, because the resulting graft-vs-host effect can act against the cancer you're trying to treat. Doctors have been using this effect since the 80s.)