A remedy against HIV could get closer after the researchers found a new way of forcing the virus to hide inside human cells.
The virus’s ability to hide inside certain white blood cells was one of the main challenges for scientists looking for a remedy. This means that there is an HIV reservoir in the body, capable of reactivation, that neither the immune system nor the drugs can attack.
Now, researchers from the Peter Doherty Institute for infection and immunity in Melbourne have demonstrated a way to make the virus visible, opening the way to fully erase it from the body.
It is based on mRNA technology, which has become of importance during the COVVI-19 pandemic When it was used in vaccines Made by Moderna and Pfizer / Biontech.
In a Document published in Nature CommunicationsResearchers have shown for the first time that mRNA can be delivered in cells where HIV hides, gliding it in a small specially formulated grease bubble. The mRNA then asks the cells to reveal the virus.
Worldwide, there is Almost 40 million people Living with HIV, which must take medication for the rest of their lives in order to remove the virus and ensure that they do not develop symptoms or do not transmit it. For many, it remains fatal, Uusidas figures suggest that a person died from HIV every minute in 2023.
It was “previously deemed impossible” to deliver mRNA to the type of white blood cells that houses HIV, said Dr. Paula Cevaal, a researcher at the Institut Doherty and Co-Primitive of the Study, because these cells did not take grease bubbles, or lipid nanoparticles (LNP), used to transport it.
The team has developed a new type of LNP that these cells will accept, known as LNP X. It said: “Our hope is that this new conception of nanoparticles could be a new path to a healing of HIV.”
When a colleague presented the test results for the first time at the weekly meeting of the laboratory, Cevaal said that he seemed too good to be true.
“We returned it to the laboratory to repeat it, and she returned the following week with results that were just as good. So we had to believe it. And of course, since then, we have repeated it, a lot, many times.
“We were overwhelmed by the way (a large part of a) night difference was – not to work before, then all of a sudden, it worked. And we were all seated in Haleter as “wow”. “
Additional research will be necessary to determine whether the revelation of the virus is enough to allow the body’s immune system to face it, or if the technology will have to be combined with other therapies to eliminate HIV from the body.
The study is based in the laboratory and was carried out in cells given by HIV patients. The path to the use of technology in the context of a remedy against patients is long and would require successful tests in animals followed by safety trials in humans, likely to take years, before efficiency trials could even begin.
“In the field of biomedicine, many things end up being part of the clinic – it is the unhappy truth; I do not want to paint a prettier image than what is reality,” said Cevaal. “But as regards specifically the field of healing of HIV, we have never seen anything close to what we see, in terms of being able to reveal this virus.
“So, from this point of view, we hope that we are also able to see this type of answer in an animal, and that we could possibly do it in humans.”
Dr. Michael Roche of the University of Melbourne and the co-ennior research author, said that discovery could have wider implications beyond HIV, the relevant white blood cells also involved in other diseases, including cancers.
Dr. Jonathan Stoye, a retrovirologist and scientist emeritus at the Francis Crick Institute, who was not involved in the study, said that the approach adopted by Melbourne’s team seemed to be a major advance on existing strategies to force the hiding place, but other studies would be necessary to determine the best way to kill it after that.
He added: “In the end, there remains a big unknown respect. Do you need to eliminate the entire success reservoir or simply most? If only 10% of the latent reservoir survived to sow a new infection?
“However, this does not affect the importance of this study, which represents a major potential advance in the delivery of mRNA for therapeutic purposes for blood cells.”
Professor Tomáš Hanke of the Jenner Institute, at the University of Oxford, challenged the idea that bringing RNA into white globules had been an important challenge. He said that the hope that all the cells of the body where HIV was hidden could be reached in this way was “just a dream”.
