Researchers manage to completely eliminate the virus in mice – Talking Democrat

An important advance in AIDS treatment research: Work in mice has shown how a sequence of two treatments can completely eliminate the virus.

Today, you can live with HIV for a long time. But none of the therapies used rids the body of the virus. They are limited to preventing the development of AIDS. However, studies on mice published in Nature Communications give rise to the hope of finding a cure for HIV carriers.

This breakthrough is based on a sequence of two co-administered treatments. The first treatment is a form of long-acting slow release antiretroviral therapy. The second involves the elimination of viral DNA with the help of a gene editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9.

The researchers tested this two-step approach in a mouse model with human HIV. "Among the mice that received LASER antiretroviral therapy followed by genetic treatment, the virus was eliminated from the cell and tissue reservoirs of nearly one-third of the infected rodents," say the authors. l & # 39; study.

But they specify that it is the combination of these two steps that brings these promising results: in mice treated only with LASER antiretroviral therapy such as those treated only by gene editing, they recorded a viral rebound in 100% of infected animals! "The big message of this work is that CRISPR-Cas9 and the removal of the virus are needed with the help of a method such as LASER co-administered to cure HIV infection," says Professor Kamel Khalil. lead author of the study.

How to decipher this new approach? HIV-positive people on antiretroviral therapy can live long lives in good health, but their bodies are not free of HIV and they must take these drugs for life to prevent the spread of AIDS. Indeed, these treatments prevent the virus from replicating but do not eliminate it. Similarly, a study conducted in 2017 by Professor Khalil showed that the use of CRISPR-Cas9 significantly reduced viral load but did not eliminate all traces of HIV.

The goal 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 the time to completely rid the cells of the viral DNA. This work on mice "paves the way for primate testing and testing on human patients within one year".