HIV/AIDS news and discussions
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2022 9:14 am
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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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-6674452053 minutes ago
Uganda's National Drug Authority has admitted it knew HIV medicine was being used to fatten up animals in 2014 but did not warn the public.
The regulator's senior drugs inspector Amos Atumanya told parliament it became aware anti-retrovirals were being given to pigs and chickens to treat them.
Mr Atumanya said that for humans, consuming small quantities of the drugs in food could be dangerous.
But the NDA has since tried to downplay his comments.
A spokesman said that if there was a health risk it would have warned the public, while the NDA's job was to regulate drugs not food or animal feed.
An effective HIV vaccine may need to prompt strong responses from immune cells called CD8+ T cells to protect people from acquiring HIV, according to a new study from researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and colleagues.
The study findings, appearing in Science, draw comparisons between the immune system activity of past HIV vaccine study participants and people with HIV who naturally keep the virus from replicating even in the absence of antiretroviral therapy (ART). The latter individuals are often called "long-term non-progressors" or "elite controllers" (LTNPs/ECs).
When HIV enters the body, the virus begins to damage the immune system by inserting itself into CD4+ T cells, which are white blood cells that help coordinate the immune response to pathogens. In most people, HIV continues to replicate and damage more and more CD4+ T cells unless controlled by ART. Among LTNPs/ECs, the immune system appears to promptly recognize CD4+ cells with HIV and activate other immune cells called CD8+ T cells. CD8+ T cells destroy CD4+ cells with HIV, enabling the suppression of HIV in a person's blood.
The aim of an effective HIV vaccine is to provide durable protective immunity to HIV, or if initial defenses are bypassed, to help control HIV in the body long-term, as happens with LTNPs/ECs. Although several preventive HIV vaccine candidates have been designed to stimulate CD8+ T-cell activity, they did not prevent HIV acquisition or control viral replication in clinical trials. Understanding and addressing this lack of effect is a scientific priority of HIV vaccine research.