Could a cure for Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) be in sight? New research has revealed how a sequence of two treatments could completely remove the virus in mice.Scientists have edited mice’s genomes and removed HIV completely. The first treatment is a long-acting slow-effective release (LASER) form of antiretroviral therapy.
The second treatment involves the removal of viral Deoxy ribonucleic Acid (DNA)/genetic material using a gene-editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9.
In a recent Nature Communications paper, the researchers describe how they tested the two-step approach in a mouse model of human HIV. Of the mice that received LASER antiretroviral therapy followed by gene editing, the “virus was eliminated from cell and tissue reservoirs in up to a third of infected animals,” note the authors.
In contrast, treating mice with either LASER antiretroviral therapy or gene editing — but not both — “resulted in viral rebound in 100 per cent of treated infected animals.”
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“The big message of this work,” says co-senior study author Kamel Khalili, Ph.D., of the Lewis Katz School of Medicine (LKSOM) at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, “is that it takes both CRISPR-Cas9 and virus suppression through a method such as LASER [antiretroviral therapy], administered together, to produce a cure for HIV infection.”
Khalili is a professor in LKSOM’s department of neuroscience and its chair. He is also the director of LKSOM’s Center for Neurovirology and of its Comprehensive NeuroAIDS Center.
According to the most recent figures from Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS), worldwide, 36.9 million people were living with HIV in 2017. In the same year, around 1.8 million contracted the virus. HIV spreads when a person comes into contact with infected bodily fluids from another person. It progressively weakens the immune system by attacking cells that defend against infection and replicating inside them.
An approach that drags dormant HIV out of hiding and then destroys it could lead to a vaccine for the virus.