Four decades ago, HIV patients were considered to be just waiting for time to die. But the development of current medical technology allows patients to live normally and have sexual intercourse without it being transferred to a partner or unborn child. Scientists from the University of Amsterdam have now announced the success of cutting HIV from infected cells.
CRISPR editing techniques have been used to remove the HIV virus from patient cells. In theory this cutting technique could be used to treat this disease completely in the future. Even so, researchers say that at this time this treatment technique is still in the conceptual stage which cannot yet be done in the real world.
Current anti-retroviral treatment techniques simply reduce the amount of virus in the body allowing patients to live a normal life with the virus almost undetected in the body but do not fully recover them. The only treatment technique that successfully cured HIV patients before was using stem cells which cost a lot of money.
The use of CRISPR to treat HIV was first reported in 2019 when successful tests were performed on laboratory mice. Meanwhile in China a baby has been born with HIV immunity also through CRISPR editing. But this experiment was criticized by the scientific world because we still do not fully know the long-term effects of gene editing on the human body.