What if the key to solving the AIDS riddle came from children? The answer is premature, but scientists from the University of Oxford have, in any case, opened up a new avenue of research, reported on its website by the weekly The Express.
They followed 170 HIV-positive young South Africans who did not develop the disease. They live normally, and yet none of them are on antiretroviral treatment. They are called “non-progressor” children, and are the subject of a publication in Science Translational Medicine. They are 5 to 10% in this case against 0.3% in adults, specifies the magazine, which recalls that one in two infected children dies of AIDS before the age of two.
The strong presence of the virus in their blood should lead, in reaction, to a hyperactivation of their immune system. This is how the body tries to fight off the infection, but it is also a way for the disease to progress. Everything happens as if, by putting all our forces into battle, our defense barrier is exhausted and lets the enemy enter. In any case, in adults.
In these children, nothing of the sort. “In fact, their immune system ignores the virus as much as possible,” one of the study’s leaders told the BBC. And Professor Philip Goulder concludes: “AIDS is not so much due to HIV as to the immune response to the virus. »
It is therefore by studying their immune system that researchers hope to open up new therapeutic approaches.
