| MadSci Network: Medicine |
Dear Megan,
Your theory is very interesting, and shows some complex thinking about a very difficult set of problems. Transfer of a person's own cells out of their body to be frozen or saved for later reimplantation is called an autologous transplant. This strategy is being used today in cases of cancer, where bone marrow cells are removed from a patient before she recieves chemotherapy or radiation therapy which could otherwise kill those bone marrow cells. After the chemotherapy is over, the bone marrow cells are reinjected into the patient and multiply to become new red and white blood cells.
HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) infection, the cause of AIDS, poses a problem for autologous transplantation of white blood cells. The problem is that the cells which are reinjected to become the patient's new, healthy immune system must remain virus-free. For your strategy to work: 1) The cells which are removed for transplant would have to be bone marrow cells instead of mature white blood cells. Chemotherapy and similar therapies kill many cell types which are rapidly dividing, such as hair follicle cells and bone marrow cells. If the strategy to eliminate HIV happens to kill bone marrow or white blood cellsin the process, the patient will need to be given healthy bone marrow. This healthy bone marrow will multiply and make new red and white blood cells. 2) The bone marrow cells which are removed would have to be free of functional HIV virus. 3) HIV would have to be eliminated or neutralized from the rest of the body. There is no effective strategy to do this today, although some drugs which can inhibit viruses or drugs such as protease inhibitors show promise for the future. Hopefully in the future a strategy similar to yours could be used to eliminate HIV infection and cure AIDS. Continuing research by dedicated scientists and physicians will be needed to solve these complex problems.
Allen Bruce
Medical Student, Washington University in St. Louis