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HIV is a sneaky virus. It can hide in the immune cells of people taking daily antiretroviral therapy (ARVs), until the treatment is stopped to return with revenge.
This forces them to continue antiretroviral therapy – and cope with its many side effects – throughout their lives.
But now, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed anti-HIV immunotherapy that not only prevents the virus from hiding, but also removes it permanently – the first step, they say, of HIV vaccine.
To be clear, it has not yet been tested in humans. But the first results are promising.
"It's like the Swiss Army's immunotherapy knife," said researcher Robbie Mailliard in a press release.
Double duty
In a study published Tuesday in the journal EBioMedicine, the Pitt team explains how she developed an immunotherapy called MDC1 to target both HIV and cytomegalovirus (CMV), a virus that infects 95% of people living with HIV.
"The immune system spends a lot of time controlling CMV, and in some people, one in five T cells is specific to this virus," said researcher Charles Rinaldo.
"That made us think – perhaps cells specific to CMV control are also a big part of the latent HIV pool, so we designed our immunotherapy to target not only HIV, but also activate T cells. auxiliary agents specific to CMV. "
The plan worked, MDC1 detecting latent HIV in the infected blood and then killing it.
The team is now considering starting to seek funding for human clinical trials – in the hope of one day creating a vaccine that would allow people infected with HIV to stop taking their medications. per day.
Read the full press release. The study was published in EBioMedicine.
This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.
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