POZ Community Forums
Meds, Mind, Body & Benefits => Research News & Studies => Topic started by: John2038 on December 07, 2011, 04:07:37 pm
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The experiment used macaques infected with the simian counterpart of HIV named SIVmac251.
Eighteen animals received ART and, in some cases, anti-reservoir agents including five monkeys enrolled in a pilot study of a multidrug ART regimen in combination with auranofin (selectively killing memory T-cells) and the glutathione synthesis inhibitor buthionine sulfoximine (BSO) previously shown to facilitate elimination of the infected cells.
allvoices (http://www.allvoices.com/news/11047963-a-monkey-experiment-paves-the-way-towards-hiv-functional-cure)
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Another article about this. It appears that 3 of the 5 monkeys treated with ART, auranofin and buthionine sulfoximine (BSO) maintained an "undetectable" viral load for more than 100 days after ART was discontinued. Encouraging news. Auranofin is used to treat arthritis, and was approved by the FDA in the 1980s. BSO has been studied in cancer treatment since the 1990s, and you can google articles in scientific journals citing minimal toxicity so it will be interesting to see how quickly human trials could be done testing this drug combination.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/515661
A Monkey Experiment Paves the Way Towards HIV Functional Cure
>PRWEB.COM Newswire Philipsburg, Sin Maarten (PRWEB) December 07, 2011
The International Workshop on HIV Persistence, Reservoirs & Eradication Strategies" is supported by the American National Institute of Health (NIH) and the French Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS).
On this second day of the workshop, a breakthrough towards HIV functional cure was reported by Doctor Andrea Savarino and his team from the Italian Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Rome).
A functional cure is a situation where some HIV genetic material remains in the body but no viral replication is found in the absence of antiretroviral therapy (ART). Usually, discontinuation of ART leads to viremia rebound due to the persistence of long-lived HIV reservoirs.
The experiment used macaques infected with the simian counterpart of HIV named SIVmac251.
Eighteen animals received ART and, in some cases, anti-reservoir agents including five monkeys enrolled in a pilot study of a multidrug ART regimen in combination with auranofin (selectively killing memory T-cells) and the glutathione synthesis inhibitor buthionine sulfoximine (BSO) previously shown to facilitate elimination of the infected cells.
The difference between the viral RNA set point before and after the treatment period was positively correlated with the number of drugs potentially acting against the viral reservoir that the monkeys had received. Extremely low viral set points (< 200 copies/ml) were obtained in three monkeys that had received the additional treatment with BSO, or multidrug ART at viral rebound, and were off ART for more than 100 days.
These data show for the first time that anti-reservoir strategies may result in spontaneous control of viral load in the chronic phase of infection, and pave the way towards a functional cure for AIDS.
About the workshop: the "International Workshop on HIV Persistence, Reservoirs & Eradication Strategies" is held at the Westin Sin Maarten Hotel, Philipsburg, December 6-9, 2011. It is a closed meeting where participants are selected for their committment in HIV persistence research. Website: http://www.informedhorizons.com/persistence2011
About Dr Savarino laboratory: Program for HIV eradication, Dept of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Viale Regina Elena, 299 00161 Rome, Italy.
Animals were housed at Bioqual, Inc., Rockville, Maryland (http://www.bioqual.com), according to international ethical standards.
Press contact: Alain Lafeuillade, MD, chairman. Workshop Secretariat, Westin Sin Maarten Hotel; Philipsburg; Ph: (721) 20543-6700; email: lafeuillade(at)orange(dot)fr
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Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb8966154.htm
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I don't understand how this worked -- I get that the anti-reservoir agents worked. But wouldn't even the little amount of virus infect cells and start the whole replication process over again? How did the monkey's control the virus after the meds were stopped?
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Here's Dr. Savarino being interviewed at a conference this week about his research on eradicating the viral reservoir in macaque monkeys. He reports on one monkey that was treated with the intensified drug combination described in the above article that has remained undetectable for 5 months so far, and thus the claim of a functional cure up to this point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIqdDU_OEFU
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Thank you for posting the link to Dr. Savarino. It seems like the way it works is that you take a regimen to stop viral replication and then you take additional drugs to kill your T-Cells slowly (yikes!) but they renew themselves. And, with replication stopped, they don't get reinfected. Eventually all the old cells are whacked and replaced. Makes sense. But what I still don't get: I know there are other reservoirs, maybe the killer drugs work on them too?
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I don't know, Geo. As Savarino says, it isn't clear yet if there is something different about the macaque's immune system that enables them to keep any remaining reservoir of HIV in check (if there is any) after the drugs activate a large amount of the dormant hiv reservoir and kill it off. We probably won't know until they start human trials. But I'm encouraged by his remarks that this should move to human trials quickly because these drugs have already been tested in humans for other conditions so there is a fair amount of safety data already.
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Here's Dr. Savarino being interviewed at a conference this week about his research on eradicating the viral reservoir in macaque monkeys. He reports on one monkey that was treated with the intensified drug combination described in the above article that has remained undetectable for 5 months so far, and thus the claim of a functional cure up to this point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIqdDU_OEFU
Was this video filmed at a motel 6? Whats with that?
Also the title of the video, DR so and so discusses HIV Cure? Really? Whatver