Gene Therapy

In this last segment, I describe another gene therapy strategy for HIV in which we propose to develop antibody-like proteins that can be expressed by a patient's B cells and will target the HIV virus for destruction. To achieve this objective, hematopoietic (blood) stem cells must to be targeted with the gene, which will ultimately develop into B cells that express the therapeutic molecule. The ultimate goal is to produce a life-long supply of anti-HIV neutralizing antibodies. In this...

In part 2, I describe the growing health problem that is facing the world with the spread of HIV and the limitations of current drug therapies and vaccine strategies. We need new ideas for tackling this problem. Here and in the next segment, I describe bold strategies of using gene therapy to conquer HIV, The approach that I describe in this segment involves gene therapy to produce short hairpin RNAs (siRNA) that target the destruction of a critical co-receptor of HIV, which the viruses that...

HMGB1 mediates endogenous TLR2 activation and brain tumor regression.

In this set of lectures, I describe the threat facing the world from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and a bold proposal on how we might meet the challenge of eliminating this disease by engineering the immune system. In part 1, I provide a broad introduction to viruses, describing their basic properties and my own history of studying the replication RNA viruses which led to the discovery of reverse transcriptase. I also illustrate the distinguishing features of equilibrium viruses...