for more than twenty years. Joining the program involves (or used to involve) an initial tissue typing, grouping would-be donors into broad categories of immunologically compatible people. A few years after I joined, when I had moved to another state, I was called up for second-stage testing to see if my antigens were a more specific match for some patient who needed marrow on that occasion. Evidently I was not a close enough match, as I was not asked then to donate marrow. Now my more specific antigen type is on file, and in all the almost two decades since then, I never have any contact with the program except periodic reminders to update the program with my address changes (as I do) and to tell my friends to sign up (as I also do).
What this illustrates is that marrow donations are based on very close antigen matches, and the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing used for those matches
divides humankind into so many small categories that it is difficult for most patients to find a match when they need bone marrow. That, and the considerable expense of harvesting bone marrow from living donors and administering bone marrow to patients in need, keeps marrow donations from being a miracle cure for most diseases. If you join the donor program, as I encourage you to do, you might reach the age of ineligibility for donation (currently age sixty) without ever being called up to donate. That appears to be more likely than not.
A tiny number of cases of a dread disease having patients who "spontaneously" (that is, through mechanisms not fully understood) go into long-term remission from their disease is a routine part of medical practice. AIDS has been scary in the years since it was discovered precisely because of how infrequently patients go into remission, compared to patients with many other dread diseases. Any unusual case of AIDS becoming less grave in its symptoms in any patient is well worth investigating, but it remains to be seen how well understanding those rare cases will generalize to a cure or preventive treatment for AIDS.
The big surprise about AIDS for people like me who were already reading about medical research before AIDS was discovered is how effective antiviral treatments for AIDS have been. The new approach of "treatment as prevention" looks very promising, and there are patients who knew of HIV-positive status in the early 1990s who are still alive and generally healthy--IF they are consistent in taking their antiviral medications--today in 2012, which was not at all expected by researchers even a few years before the protease inhibitor medications were developed. Antiviral drugs are still rare, and AIDS has been a surprising case of effective drug development on a very short time scale.
http://marrow.org/Home.aspx
for more than twenty years. Joining the program involves (or used to involve) an initial tissue typing, grouping would-be donors into broad categories of immunologically compatible people. A few years after I joined, when I had moved to another state, I was called up for second-stage testing to see if my antigens were a more specific match for some patient who needed marrow on that occasion. Evidently I was not a close enough match, as I was not asked then to donate marrow. Now my more specific antigen type is on file, and in all the almost two decades since then, I never have any contact with the program except periodic reminders to update the program with my address changes (as I do) and to tell my friends to sign up (as I also do).
http://marrow.org/Join/Join_the_Registry.aspx
What this illustrates is that marrow donations are based on very close antigen matches, and the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing used for those matches
http://marrow.org/Patient/Transplant_Process/Search_Process/...
divides humankind into so many small categories that it is difficult for most patients to find a match when they need bone marrow. That, and the considerable expense of harvesting bone marrow from living donors and administering bone marrow to patients in need, keeps marrow donations from being a miracle cure for most diseases. If you join the donor program, as I encourage you to do, you might reach the age of ineligibility for donation (currently age sixty) without ever being called up to donate. That appears to be more likely than not.
A tiny number of cases of a dread disease having patients who "spontaneously" (that is, through mechanisms not fully understood) go into long-term remission from their disease is a routine part of medical practice. AIDS has been scary in the years since it was discovered precisely because of how infrequently patients go into remission, compared to patients with many other dread diseases. Any unusual case of AIDS becoming less grave in its symptoms in any patient is well worth investigating, but it remains to be seen how well understanding those rare cases will generalize to a cure or preventive treatment for AIDS.
The big surprise about AIDS for people like me who were already reading about medical research before AIDS was discovered is how effective antiviral treatments for AIDS have been. The new approach of "treatment as prevention" looks very promising, and there are patients who knew of HIV-positive status in the early 1990s who are still alive and generally healthy--IF they are consistent in taking their antiviral medications--today in 2012, which was not at all expected by researchers even a few years before the protease inhibitor medications were developed. Antiviral drugs are still rare, and AIDS has been a surprising case of effective drug development on a very short time scale.