A British man could become the first
person in the world to be cured of HIV using a new therapy designed by
a team of scientists from five United Kingdom universities.
The unnamed 44-year-old is the first of
50 people to complete a trial of the ambitious treatment, designed by
scientists and doctors from five of Britain’s leading universities.
The Managing Director of the National
Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research
Infrastructure, UK, Mark Samuels, said the treatment was the first
therapy created to have tracked down and destroyed HIV in every part of
the body, including in the dormant cells that evade current treatments.
The scientists told The Sunday Times
of London that presently “the virus is completely undetectable in the
man’s blood, although that could be as a result of regular drugs.”
However, if the dormant cells are also cleared out it could represent the first complete cure.
Samuels said, “This is one of the first
serious attempts at a full cure for HIV. We are exploring the real
possibility of curing HIV. This is a huge challenge and it’s still early
days but the progress has been remarkable.”
The trial is being undertaken by
researchers from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial
College, London, University College, London and King’s College, London.
HIV is so difficult to treat because it
targets the immune system, splicing itself into the DNA of T-cells so
that they not only ignore the disease, but turn into viral factories
which reproduce the virus.
Current treatments, called anti-retroviral therapies, target that process but they cannot spot dormant infected T-cells.
The new therapy works in two stages.
Firstly, a vaccine helps the body to recognise the HIV-infected cells so
it can clear them out. Secondly, a new drug called Vorinostat activates
the dormant T-cells so they can be spotted by the immune system.
A consultant physician at Imperial
College, London, Prof. Sarah Fidler, said the new therapy was
specifically designed to clear the body of all HIV viruses, including
dormant ones.
Fidler said, “It has worked in the
laboratory and there is good evidence it will work in humans too, but we
must stress we are still a long way from any actual therapy.
“We will continue with medical tests for
the next five years and at the moment we are not recommending stopping
ART but in the future, depending on the test results, we may explore
this.”
Only one person has ever been cured of
HIV. He is Timothy Brown, also known as the ‘second’ Berlin patient, who
received a stem cell transplant from a patient with natural immunity to
HIV in 2008.
Read more at: The Punch
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