In clinical trials, new antibody therapy controls HIV for months after treatment

A new clinical trial shows that broadly neutralizing antibodies can suppress HIV for up to four months, far longer than currently available drugs.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180926140834.htm

Human genome editing-the issues explored-Wellcome Sanger Institute Blog

Recently, a Chinese scientist He Jiankui, announced the birth of twin girls whose genomes he edited to provide resistance to HIV. The scientific community was left in a state of shock and there was an outcry from scientists all around the world condemning He's actions. This revelation reinforced the need for an open, transparent and international debate on germline editing.

https://sangerinstitute.blog/2018/12/20/human...ting-the-issues-explored/

CRISPR-baby scientist fired by university

Investigation by Chinese authorities finds He Jiankui broke national regulations in his controversial work on gene-edited babies

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00246-2

Researchers have launched an ultra-large virtual docking library expected to grow to more than 1 billion molecules by next year. It will expand by 1000-fold the number of such "make-on-demand" compounds readily available to scientists for chemical biology and drug discovery. The larger the library, the better its odds of weeding out inactive "decoy" molecules that could otherwise lead researchers down blind alleys.

A staggering number of potential drug-like molecules are known to exist. Yet, hundreds-of-millions to billions of diverse molecules have remained inaccessible due to limitations of existing methods used to compile molecular libraries, say the researchers. For example, their virtual structure-based docking technique, while promising, risks finding many false positives or "decoys" -- flaws in the model allow for molecules that appear plausible but turn out to be biologically inactive.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers focused on molecules that result from 130 well-characterized chemical reactions using 70,000 different chemical building blocks. Computer simulations with these molecules showed that as the size of a library grew, the ratio of "true actives" to decoys increased -- just as a study's statistical power increases with a larger sample.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190206131924.htm

HIV Reportedly Cured in a Second Patient

Some Doctors Concerned That Treatment Can't Be Duplicated on a Larger Scale

Dr. Anthony Fauci Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says, "This approach is risky, not feasible and not scalable, and so while interesting, it really does not advance the field very much."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOrQ6Sqro