Laboratory mice completely cured of HIV through Tre-Recombinase

The original article title here is "Highly Significant Antiviral Activity of HIV-1 LTR-Specific Tre-Recombinase in Humanized Mice," which is admittedly too long for the Hacker News title limit of eighty characters. I might suggest a more accurate submission title for the article could be made out of the summary sentence in the abstract, "The presented data suggest that Tre-recombinase might become a valuable component of a future therapy that aims at virus eradication." So perhaps a submission title of "Tre-recombinase might become a valuable future therapy for HIV" sums up the suggestion made by this preliminary research finding. As usual, I recommend reading LISP hacker and Google director of research Peter Norvig's online essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

whenever we discuss preliminary research findings here on Hacker News. This result may not be replicated--many, many preliminary research findings are not. And this result in a mouse model may not translate into a safe and effective treatment in human medicine. But as usual I am glad that scientists all around the world are engaged in fundamental research in the hope of better understanding nature.

The HIV problem in humanized mice is such a difficult problem. Even if we overcome the technical challenges of mass-producing tiny condoms, and the logistical challenges of distributing them, mice simply do not use them. The cultural and educational challenges are too great.

Read the entire thing, where does it say in any word or in medical terms that they were "completely cured".

All I can see is hints to great progress in the field.

Exceprts:

"Clearly, it is not expected that HIV-1 can be eradicated by Tre activity alone."

"Tre-recombinase technology can be a valuable component of such a multi-tiered strategy to treat HIV-infected patients."

That is certainly an interesting approach to the problem. If I read this correctly "However, expressing an engineered HIV-1 long terminal repeat (LTR) site-specific recombinase (Tre), shown to excise integrated proviral DNA in vitro," they have expressed an RNA which targets and replaces the viral DNA in the cells with a non-HIV transcription. That reads a lot like some of the more current gene therapy papers read, with permanent modification of cells rather than simply killing target cells.

It's a step forward, but treatment is still a long way off:

"Independently of the selected gene therapy strategy, and prior to its potential use in HIV-infected patients, vector technology has to be developed that allows safe and efficient gene transfer followed by reliable transgene expression in target cells"

Gene therapy isn't possible yet because we still can't control where the transgenes get inserted into the human genome. There's the risk of disrupting oncogenes/oncosuppressors, and the probability of getting cancer would be high.

Might this mean that we can resume the sexual revolution?