Ask anyone who’s ever had a dangerously sick kid: CHOP — that would be the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — rules. Anyone we’ve ever spoken with who’s had any experience there generally raves: How the doctors are all but miracle workers, how the staff are friendly and kind, and so on. But CHOP might have really outdone themselves this time, when CHOP Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Philip Johnson and his team messed around and might have just come up with a gene that fights down HIV. What? Let Dr. Johnson explain it in his fancy doctor talk:

“Your muscle cells, we deposit the vaccine, it’s actually a gene, and it makes a protein, and in this case, interferes with a virus and your muscles make the protein. It actually gets into the circulation, and there it does it’s [sic] thing, it blocks the virus from infecting.”

Human trials — up until now, Dr. Johnson’s been trying all of this out on what are now super-AIDS-fighting monkeys — should begin shortly, and seriously, how psyched would be forever if PHILLY CURED AIDS? Try to think about how sweet that parade would be.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 11:21 am.