Interfering with genes

摘要

In 2008, doctors in Germany made an astounding announcement: they had wiped out HIV from a middle-aged man when they gave him a bone-marrow transplant to treat his leukaemia.rnThe doctors had replaced the bone marrow with that of a donor who carried a genetic variation that disrupts the function of the CCR5 receptor in T cells. When this molecular doorway is broken, HIV cannot enter host cells. To this day, despite having stopped all antiretroviral therapy, the man has no detectable HIV in his blood.