AIDSWEEKLY Plus, Monday, 21 July 1997
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
Cord-blood CD34(+) cells from the children of HIV infected mothers are appropriate for ex vivo expansion.
Should the children develop HIV infection, the cells could be used - either with or without gene therapy - for future engraftment.
"We expect to correlate properties of hematopoietic cells with disease stage in order to determine the feasibility of using these cells for gene-therapy approaches and other novel therapies aimed at treating hematopoietic defects in HIV infected individuals," noted Nirmal K. Banda and colleagues of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver.
Banda reported preliminary study findings in a poster presentation to "New Opportunities for HIV Therapy - From Discovery to Clinical Proof-of-Concept," the 2nd Joint Conference of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Strategic Program for Innovative Research on AIDS Treatment (SPIRAT) and the National Cooperative Drug Discovery Groups for the Treatment of HIV Infection (NCDDG- HIV), held June 22-26, 1997, in Vienna, Virginia.
Banda et al. have thus far purified CD34(+) hematopoietic progenitor cells from the cord blood of four infants born to women with HIV infection.
Three of the mothers had CD4 counts of >300 cells/(micro)L; the fourth had a CD4 count of 125 cells/(micro)L. All four received zidovudine (AZT) during the prenatal period.
Although HIV RNA sequences could be detected in the HIV(+) women's cord blood, no virus was detected in purified CD34(+) cells.
Compared to 19 cord-blood samples from uninfected mothers, cord blood from the HIV infected women tended to have lower numbers of hematopoietic cells and poorer plating efficiency. Nevertheless, ex vivo growth of purified CD34(+) cells (in Whittaker X-Vivo media plus interleukin 3 (IL-3), IL-6, and stem-cell factor) was similar to that seen for control CD34(+) cells.
Similarly, retroviral transduction - simulating a possible gene-therapy vector - was similar for CD34(+) cells from HIV infected and uninfected women.
Banda noted that the stem cell studies will be extended to include bone marrow from HIV infected donors. - by Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
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