POZ Community Forums
Meds, Mind, Body & Benefits => Research News & Studies => Topic started by: Inchlingblue on August 19, 2010, 11:11:25 am
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This research is preliminary and has so far only been tried in the lab but it sounds intriguing.
HIV findings 'offer hope for cure'
Aug 19, 2010 7:55 AM | By Sapa
Israeli researchers says they have discovered a way of killing off cells infected with HIV that offers hope for a cure for the disease.
The technique involved getting the virus to overload the host cell with viral DNA, which made the cell self-destruct and kill off the virus.
However they warned that so far they have only "cured" HIV in small dishes of cells in a laboratory.
Their findings would be published on Thursday in the journal Aids Research and Therapy.
Antiretroviral therapy, the medical world's strongest existing weapon against the virus, stopped HIV from replicating, but did not eradicate it from host cells or eliminate those cells.
The researchers said that their approach could lead to an anti-HIV therapy that would eradicate the virus.
One of the authors of the paper, Professor Abraham Loyter of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, said HIV spread through the human body when its DNA was incorporated into the genome of host cells.
However the virus inserted only enough DNA to replicate, and not enough to make the host genome unstable, which would lead to the death of the infected cells in a process called apoptosis.
Loyter said he and his team used amino acids called peptides to boost the integration of HIV DNA into the human genome.
This caused the infected cells to go into "panic mode" and self-destruct.
The experiment did not have any effect on non-infected cells.
"Whilst this research is promising, a major caveat with these studies is that they are preliminary," Loyter said.
"So far these experiments have only been shown to 'cure' HIV from small dishes of cultured cells in the authors' laboratory, but the findings are an exciting development in the quest to eradicate this devastating global pandemic."
The process "may eventually be developed into a new and general anti-viral therapy", he said.
LINKS:
http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article610786.ece/HIV-findings-offer-hope-for-cure
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/bc-acf081710.php
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TO me, it sounds at least as promising as a lot of the other stuff in the test tube stage. Why no attention from the western media?
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TO me, it sounds at least as promising as a lot of the other stuff in the test tube stage. Why no attention from the western media?
It was published today so it's probably too soon to tell what attention it might get.
The link below is the provisional pdf from Aids Research and Therapy. It would be great if this research moves along quickly.
This should interest researchers who are working on eradication such as Robert Siciliano at Johns Hopkins.
LINK:
http://www.aidsrestherapy.com/content/pdf/1742-6405-7-31.pdf
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I got quite excited when I read this today in the newspaper (yeah, it has appeared, at least in my country), but now I don't really now...
For this mechanism to work, the virus in the infected cell must be replicating, doesn't it? So I believe it doesn't directly address the problem of the reservoirs. Any ideas?
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I got quite excited when I read this today in the newspaper (yeah, it has appeared, at least in my country), but now I don't really now...
For this mechanism to work, the virus in the infected cell must be replicating, doesn't it? So I believe it doesn't directly address the problem of the reservoirs. Any ideas?
Come off of HAART and the reservoirs go active, right?
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Inch,
Good stuff. tkey in another thread posted additional links with the abstract. Here:
Re: AIDS cure research for everyone
« Reply #7 on: Today at 08:45:52 AM »
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more info on that one
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100818205306.htm
http://www.aidsrestherapy.com/content/pdf/1742-6405-7-31.pdf
Read the pdf ----- exciting. There is a pathway to a cure!
v
Hellraiser,
Your right sleeping cells wake -up causing the infection to gain a foothold again.
v
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Come off of HAART and the reservoirs go active, right?
Your right sleeping cells wake -up causing the infection to gain a foothold again.
I'm not sure if that's way it works. I thought reservoirs where continuously, though slowly, activating and that's were the residual viremia comes from. ie: haart doesn't make reservoirs "go to sleep".
That is, when you stop haart, not all the cells in the reservoirs wake up, just a single virus released from one of that cells is able to resume infection.
That was my understanding, though I may have got it wrong.
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very exciting stuff, Inch! ;)
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loop,
Your right. HAART keeps the virus under control when the latent cell wakes up and exposes more virus.
The fact is that if your stop HAART, your infection will come roaring back because, as you stated, there is nothing controlling the virus. I should have said "when" sleeping cells wake -up the infection gains a foothold again".
v
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Thanks for the explanation, veritas.
In any case, it's a very promising finding which could set the grounds for something more :-)
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It remains to be seen if this approach will work on the human body but the whole point of it is to eliminate the latent reservoirs. The "Mix" they're talking about are specific peptides along with the PI saquinavir (aka invirase). It seems to act in the opposite manner of an integrase inhibitor (such as Isentress). Rather than inhibiting HIV's ability to integrate into a cell's DNA this mix promotes more cDNA integration. This causes a level of instability in the cell that causes the whole cell to die (apoptosis), taking the virus along with it.
It's astounding that HIV has evolved so seemingly perfectly. It only integrates into cells at levels that do not cause the cell to die, allowing the virus to remain dormant and viable. The beauty of this approach is that it attempts to beat HIV at its own game so to speak. It ups the ante and causes more cDNA integration than would normally be the case. It tips the scales in our favor and not that of the virus.
Why they decided to use saquinavir is a mystery to me, they don't explain it in the initial pdf. There are many more and better PIs around. Is there something specific about saquinavir that, when mixed with the peptides, caused more viral integration? Or would other PIs also work and maybe work better?
Clearly more tests are called for and likely more fine-tuning can be achieved but this is still very promising research.
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This reminds me somehow of the scrubbing bubbles theory from a few years ago. What was that called abzymes or something like that.
I know I shouldn't be mocking of something potentially wonderful. I loved the image of scrubbing bubbles. This Israeli thing I see as bubble wrap - popping all the "bad" bubbles. Love doing that. Course if you pop too many bubbles, the wrap is useless.
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Course if you pop too many bubbles, the wrap is useless.
One important part of this research is that it did not have any effect on non-infected cells.
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Is it me or does it seem like a lot of the more recent (and exciting) research announcements revolve around peptides? I'm not sure what a peptide is, but it seems to be effective, huh?
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Is it me or does it seem like a lot of the more recent (and exciting) research announcements revolve around peptides? I'm not sure what a peptide is, but it seems to be effective, huh?
"Peptides are compounds which are formed by linking one or more amino acids with a covalent bond. These compounds are classified as polymers, because they typically link together in long chains. All animals on Earth have peptides in their body, and in a way, peptides are one of the building blocks of life. When a peptide chain gets especially long, it turns into a protein. Peptides and proteins represent a wide world of possibilities, and many molecular biologists spend years researching the functions of single peptides and proteins to learn more about how the body works.
When discussing peptides, a lot of scientific terminology tends to get thrown around, and it can help to know what various terms mean. A covalent bond is a type of chemical bond which occurs when atoms share electrons. The specific type of covalent bond formed in peptides is known as a peptide bond or amide bond, and it forms when the carboxl group of one amino acid attaches to another. Carboxyl groups are clusters of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules, in case you're curious.
The classification of a peptide as a polymer is sometimes confusing to people who are not familiar with this use of the term “polymer.” While many people mean “plastics” when they talk about polymers, in chemistry, a polymer is any sort of repeating chain connected with covalent bonds. Polymers can get extremely complex, as one might imagine.
A peptide can perform a wide range of functions in the body, depending on which amino acids are involved. Some can regulate hormones, for example, while others can have an antibiotic function. The body is also equipped to break down and reuse peptides; if you eat meat, for example, the enzymes in your intestines break down the protein at its amide bonds to create an assortment of peptides which may be digested or excreted, depending on the needs of your body.
The dividing line between a peptide and a protein is somewhat fluid. Proteins are much more complex than peptides, because they are so much longer, and most proteins are folded into complex structures to accommodate all of their amino acids. As a general rule of thumb, if more than 50 amino acids are involved, the compound is a protein, while shorter chains are considered peptides."
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Is it me or does it seem like a lot of the more recent (and exciting) research announcements revolve around peptides? I'm not sure what a peptide is, but it seems to be effective, huh?
This is the info Wikipedia gives about peptides:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide
:)
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Thanks, Hellraiser and George....I'm not going to pretend to understand all that information, but I appreciate your having posted it. Some of the information sounds similar to what Dr Paul is doing in Houston with abzyme therapy. Regardless, it looks like those peptides may prove to be an HIV+ person's best friend at some point in the not too distant future ;)
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Why no attention from the western media?
Greed. :-[ The western don't want it to be discovered by poor country like Israel.
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Israel is "poor"? That's news to me. Israel's GDP per capita is #28 in the world (IMF) and #25 (World Bank), on par with South Korea and New Zealand.
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One important part of this research is that it did not have any effect on non-infected cells.
interesting to say the least
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Israel is "poor"? That's news to me. Israel's GDP per capita is #28 in the world (IMF) and #25 (World Bank), on par with South Korea and New Zealand.
That is all donated money by the US and other westerners. No oil, no minerals, no nothing except the love of others.
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That is all donated money by the US and other westerners. No oil, no minerals, no nothing except the love of others.
orly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Israel
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That is all donated money by the US and other westerners. No oil, no minerals, no nothing except the love of others.
I don't know. Here in Southern Europe we import oranges and lemons from Israel. ;D