Doctors may someday have a new way to combat AIDS by going straight to the source: destroying the virus before it has a chance to wreak havoc on a patient’s immune system. Thomas Merigan, MD, the George and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine in infectious diseases at Stanford University School of Medicine, is seeking volunteers for a study to test a possible method of empowering an infected person’s own cells to destroy HIV as it enters the cell. The process involves removing the patient’s stem cells - the ones in the bloodstream that form the different immune system cell types that HIV infects, such as T cells and macrophages - and inserting a gene that produces an HIV-obliterating enzyme.
