https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-03- ... n-hiv.html
by The Wistar Institute
As of 2022, approximately 1.2 million people in the United States are living with HIV. Antiretroviral therapies have enabled many of these individuals to live productive, symptom-free lives, but a cure that permanently eliminates HIV from an infected person's body is still a long way off. However, researchers at The Wistar Institute, an international biomedical research institute in the areas of cancer, immunology, infectious disease, and vaccine development, have zeroed in on a promising compound that targets HIV reservoirs that persist in people living with HIV despite the presence of anti-HIV therapy.
In a recent paper published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, researchers identified hopeaphenol, a natural plant-based compound, as possessing antiviral properties that are effective against HIV. Specifically, the compound helps to block not only viral replication but also to inhibit reactivation of the "viral reservoir" that persists after anti-HIV therapy within human immune cells and can make new virus at any time, even when patients are receiving ART and exhibit no viral symptoms.
"This is important because anti-HIV therapy can stop the symptoms, but it doesn't eliminate the potential of the underlying HIV reservoir from re-emerging. The virus is still there and still a little bit active—kind of rumbling and turning on—and the immune system is stressed about that," said Ian Tietjen, Ph.D., the lead author on the paper and a research assistant professor in the laboratory of Luis Montaner, D.V.M., D.Phil., senior author, in Wistar's Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center.
