An important advance in research to cure AIDS: work carried out on mice has revealed how a sequence of two treatments could completely eliminate the virus.
You can now live a long time with HIV. But none of the therapies used rid the body of the virus. They are limited to preventing the development of AIDS. Work carried out on mice and published in NatureCommunications yet revive the hope of finding a treatment to cure HIV carriers.
This advance is based on a sequence of two treatments administered together. The first treatment is a form of long-acting slow-release antiretroviral therapy (LASER). The second involves removing viral DNA using a gene-editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9.
The virus eliminated in almost a third of infected rodents
The researchers tested this two-step approach in a murine, ie mouse, model of human HIV. “Among mice that received LASER antiretroviral therapy followed by genetic editing, virus was cleared from cell and tissue reservoirs in nearly one-third of infected rodents,” the study authors say.
But they point out that it is the combination of these two steps that brings these promising results: in mice treated only with LASER antiretroviral therapy as in those treated only with gene editing, they recorded a viral rebound in 100% of the animals. infected! “The big message of this work is that both CRISPR-Cas9 and suppression of the virus by a method such as LASER administered together are needed in order to cure HIV infection”, insists Prof. Kamel Khalil, lead author of the study.
Removing all traces of HIV
How to decipher this new approach? HIV-positive people who take antiretroviral treatment can live a long healthy life, but their bodies are not free of HIV and they must take these drugs for life to prevent the development of AIDS. Indeed these treatments prevent the virus from replicating but do not eliminate it. Similarly, a study conducted in 2017 by Pr. Khalil showed that the use of CRISPR-Cas9 considerably reduced the viral load but without managing to eliminate all traces of HIV.
The aim of the new study was therefore to see if LASER antiretroviral therapy was able to suppress HIV replication long enough for the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool to have time to completely rid cells of the Viral DNA. This work on mice “opens the way to trials on primates and then trials on human patients within a year”.
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