George Kebaso @Morrak
A Kenyan medic is among five researchers at an American university who have come up with test trials that promises to eliminate the HIV virus that causes Aids.
The study that was reported in the Nature Communications journal on Tuesday, raises hopes of a vaccine that could eliminate the HIV virus from the body unlike the current Antiretroviral (ARV) therapy that suppresses the replication of the virus.
Dr Benson Edagwa and fellow researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre (UNMC) and the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University announced on Tuesday they had successfully eliminated the HIV virus responsible for Aids from living animals.
Positive progress
The announcement has caused excitement among local HIV researchers and raised hopes that a cure for the deadly disease that has claimed thousands of lives in Kenya was in the offing.
Prof Matilu Mwau, a researcher in infectious and parasitic diseases at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) said what the scientists in the US university had done is “an unbelievable part of human imagination”.
“It is a crazy kind of effort to eliminate a disease that has tormented huge populations in the country. Looking closely at what various scientists have been doing since last year, you can easily say that HIV is going to be cured,” an elated Mwau, the Chief Research Officer at the Centre for Infectious and Parasitic diseases told People Daily yesterday.
Renowned researcher, Prof Omu Anzala, who heads the Kenya Aids Vaccine Initiative (Kavi) at the University of Nairobi’s department of medical microbiology, described the US effort as “a positive progress in the research of a disease that has become a nightmare for mankind”.
Giving the process an expert breakdown, Mwau said the scientists hope to do it in human beings by escalating the research to primates after the successful procedure in mice.
From the results achieved by Edagwa and his team, Mwau said, they took human bone marrow and put in mice that started to produce cells that look like those in humans. They then infected the cells in the mice with HIV virus and after a while they discovered that the rodents had fallen sick.
Therapeutic strategy
“The next move was to give the mice Antiretroviral Therapies to treat them. After a while again, they saw that the animals were healing. They used two tools to achieve the results,” he explained.
In the announcement by Edagwa, an assistant professor of pharmacology at UNMC and the team, previously they used a therapeutic strategy known as long-acting slow-effective release (LASER) ART. And in the latest results, the researchers combined the LASER ART with an enzyme-packed system that removes fragments of HIV from infected cells.
Pooling resources
Howard Gendelman, the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience at University of Nebraska Medical Center, said this achievement could not have been possible without an extraordinary team effort that included virologists, immunologists, molecular biologists, pharmacologists, and pharmaceutical experts.
The team used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to develop an original gene editing and gene therapy delivery system aimed at removing HIV DNA from genomes harbouring the virus.
In rats and mice, they showed that the gene editing system could effectively excise large fragments of HIV DNA from infected cells, significantly impacting viral gene expression.
Published in the online journal, Nature Communications, the researchers said they targeted the replication-competent HIV-1 DNA. The CRIDPR-Cas9 system consists of enzymes that introduce a change into the DNA in a specific location in an animal
Gendelman, also a professor of Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine at the university said it is only by pooling resources together that they were able to make the ground breaking discovery.
“Our study shows that treatment to suppress HIV replication and gene editing therapy, when given sequentially, can eliminate HIV from cells and organs of infected animals,” said Kamel Khalili, Ph.D, Laura H Carnell Professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience, director of the Center for Neurovirology, and director of the Comprehensive NeuroAIDS Centre at LKSOM.
