A new HIV drug that looks like a "Swiss army knife of immunotherapies"

HIV is a delicate virus that causes a unique phenomenon in which the virus hides in the immune cells of patients treated with antiretroviral drugs. When they stop taking drugs, the virus comes back. Researchers have developed a new drug that can dispel the virus and kill it once and for all. The results of the preliminary study were published last week in the journal EBioMedicine.

The team at the University of Pittsburgh who developed this immunotherapy said it was the first step towards developing an HIV vaccine. The first results of the drug in the laboratory have been promising, he added. Human trials are still in a while, they are in agreement. Researcher Robbie Mailliard said: "It's like the Swiss Army's immunotherapy knife."

The team explains in the study how she developed an immunotherapy and called it MDC1. The drug is able to attack both HIV and cytomegalovirus (CMV). CMV is a common co-infection with HIV that affects 95% of people with HIV. Researcher Charles Rinaldo, professor and director of the Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Pitt Public Health, explained, "The immune system spends a lot of time controlling CMV; in some people, one in five T cells is specific to this virus. This has made us think – perhaps cells specific to the fight against CMV are also a big part of the latent reservoir of HIV. So we designed our immunotherapy not only to target HIV, but also to activate CMV-specific helper T cells. "

Cytomegalovirus CMV in a human cell. Image credit: Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock

The team included blood samples from two dozen men from the Pitt's Men study. This large study was once again part of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS). Researcher Jan Kristoff said, "MACS participants played a vital role in the success of this study. You need to collect a lot of blood to find latently infected T cells by functional HIV in people on antiretroviral therapy (ART) – this could only represent one in ten million cells. Thus, the men sat up to four hours connected to a machine that treated their blood and returned several times to give more samples. "

They isolated dendritic cells that could kill the HIV virus. Robbie Mailliard explained that these cells "give up the ball and dictate the games, telling the other immune cells where to go and what to fight". From these cells, they created "monocyte-derived dendritic cells exhibiting antigen presenting type 1," or MDC1. Mailliard said: "Without adding any other drug or treatment, MDC1s were then able to recruit killer T cells to eliminate virus-infected cells. With only MDC1, we managed to kill and kill – it's like the Swiss knife of immunotherapies. To our knowledge, this is the first study to program dendritic cells to incorporate CMV in order to get the boost, as well as to kill the virus. "

The team found success with this approach and found that MDC1 could cajole HIV latent or hidden in the blood and then kill it effectively. This new therapy, he adds, could be "all-in-one" immunotherapy for people infected with HIV and could mean that the patient no longer needs to take antiretroviral treatment at the same time. life throughout his life. At present, they are seeking funding for large-scale human trials with their approach.