Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a virus that attacks the immune system of the body. If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Many scientists have been working hard to find out a cure for HIV for the last 40 years.

A team at Northwestern University sought to find out how the HIV virus with only 12 proteins and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV- hijacks the body and spread across systems.

CRISPR gene-editing technology could lead to long-lasting treatments and new therapeutic strategies for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
Gene editing is used to discover human proteins hijacked by HIV to replicate in blood. Scientists say that "CRISPR gene-editing technology is a new assay and is the most faithful representation of what's happening in the body during HIV infection. Over half the genes identified in the study had never been looked at in the context of HIV infection."

"The existing drug treatments are one of our most important tools in fighting the HIV epidemic and have been amazingly effective at suppressing viral replication and spread," said Judd Hultquist, Assistant Professor of medicine in infectious diseases at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
He further added, "But these treatments aren’t curative, so individuals living with HIV have to follow a strict treatment regimen that requires continual access to good affordable health care — that’s simply not the world we live in."

Scientists have used a new CRISPR gene-editing approach to identify human genes that were important for HIV infection in the blood and found that 86 genes may play an important role in the way HIV replicates and cause disease. In the study, T cells were isolated from donated human blood, and hundreds of genes were knocked out using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing.