Washington - Researchers said yesterday they had found a possible way to use the HIV virus that causes AIDS as an effective delivery system for gene therapy. Tests in mice show a crippled version of the virus - one in which only a single gene is intact - might be used to deliver new genes that can help cure haemophiliacs.
Writing in the journal Science, Dr Inder Verma and a team of colleagues at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, said their highly abbreviated HIV virus successfully "infected" mice with human blood cells. They think they hit some of the stem cells. In the blood, such hematopoietic stem cells create the cells of the immune system, as well as cells that control clotting.