Why Gene Therapy?
Your immune system includes many parts: thymus, lymph nodes, bone marrow, etc. The cells in your body are made from cells found in your bone marrow. One special cell found in bone marrow, called a stem cell, is sometimes called the mother of all cells. If your immune system is intact and working well, then a single stem cell could divide and populate the full range of cells in your body. Imagine there’s a gene that makes a cell resistant to HIV infection. In theory, if that gene was inserted into a stem cell, all of the offspring of that cell would carry the gene and be resistant to HIV infection. Again, in theory, as HIV destroys a person’s CD4+ and other immune cells, the new cells resistant to HIV would replace them and thrive. Eventually these newer cells would take over and HIV could no longer weaken the immune system. Although a person may still have HIV, it could do no harm. The HIV may just die out because there are no cells for it to infect; or, it might persist but couldn’t h
