Researchers
at various reserach institutes has been working and successful in finding out a
dru that can work against HIV virus and immune against it. The drug has worked
against doses of HIV that were higher than transmitted between humans, and works for at
least eight months after injection.
A new drug
led by the team of researchers at Scripps
Research Institute in the US, is found to be effective against doses of HIV-1,
HIV-2 and SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) that have been extracted from
humans - including what researchers consider to be the ‘hardest-to-stop’ variants.
"Our
compound is the broadest and most potent entry inhibitor described so far,”
lead researcher Michael Farzan from the Scripps Institute said in a press
release. "Unlike antibodies, which fail to neutralise a large fraction of
HIV-1 strains, our protein has been effective against all strains tested,
raising the possibility it could offer an effective HIV vaccine alternative.”
HIV infects
a person by infecting his T lymphocyte, a type of white blood cells and
injecting his own genetic material into to tranform it to HIV producing
machine, thus making our immune acts against us.
The team has
discovered that a particular type of
protein found on the surface of white blood cells can actually bind to the
surface of the HIV virus in two different places simultaneously, which means
that not only does the virus no longer have a chance to change the position of
its receptors to escape, it’s also being blocked from entering the T lymphocyte
cells.
"When
antibodies try to mimic the receptor, they touch a lot of other parts of the
viral envelope that HIV can change with ease," said one of the team,
Matthew Gardner, from the Scripps Institute. "We've developed a direct
mimic of the receptors without providing many avenues that the virus can use to
escape, so we catch every virus thus far.”
"We are
closer than any other approach to universal protection, but we still have
hurdles, primarily with safety for giving it to many, many people,” Franzen
told the BBC. One such concern is that no one really knows what the long-term
implications would be for a person who is having an anti-HIV response being
pumped around their body non-stop. The team will be looking into this when they
get their human trials underway.
source: Sciencealert
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