Marshall suffered from an extremely severe form of leukemia. Today the man is completely healthy. All thanks to the use in the treatment of HIV.
Viruses have been used to treat all kinds of diseases for many years. They are usually used as gene carriers to alter the DNA of human cells. HIV therapy is, however, obviously controversial.
In 2012, Marshall Jensen was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, one of the more aggressive forms of blood cancer. The prognosis for Marshall was not good. The 30-year-old man then left his home state of Utah and spent the next two years traveling the country in search of pioneering therapies to cure his disease.
In this way, Marshall ended up in Philadelphia, where a novel method of using HIV to treat leukemia was developed. The therapy is the result of twenty years of work by Dr. Carl June and his team at Penn Medicine.
The method involves collecting millions of T-lymphocytes from the patient’s body. Then they are treated with an inactivated virus. Scientists used its ability to modify the DNA of infected cells. The virus reprograms T cells so that they learn to recognize cancer cells and then actively destroy them. One lymphocyte can destroy approximately 1000 cancer cells.
The use of an inactivated virus is perfectly safe: It is an inactivated virus, but it retains one key feature of HIV, which is the ability to insert new genes into a cell, explained Dr. June.
The experimental therapy was tested on about 30 people. Marshall Jensen was one of them. The treatment worked for him and his leukemia is now in remission. The man returned home a few days ago.
Based on: http://www.independent.co.uk/