A team of scientists from the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBiS) has discovered characteristics of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that are compatible with treatment, the CSIC announced on Tuesday.
The study was carried out jointly by IBiS, a joint center of the Supreme Scientific Research Council (CSIC), the Junta of Andalusia and the University of Seville in collaboration with the Ragon Institute of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Havard University. The Boston project consisted of a study of a group of people with HIV whose bodies were able to control the virus without detecting its presence in the blood.
The so-called “elite HIV controllers”—the small group of people with HIV who can maintain a reduced viral load for several years without antiretroviral drugs—can be divided into two subgroups: those who lose control of their viral load and those who, on the contrary, maintain control indefinitely.
The research team discovered, through ultra-sensitive virus characterization techniques that study the viral reservoir or hiding place in which HIV remains hidden in the cell’s set of chromosomes, that those “elite controllers” who lose control despite the presence of a small number of whole or complete viruses they integrate in the region of the cell chromosome set accessible to the cellular mechanism.
However, for those who retain control of the virus indefinitely, it was found that in 70 percent of cases, no full viruses were found in the cells analyzed, meaning they did not have a virus with infectious ability.
These new discoveries suggest that some of the “permanent controllers” may be cured of HIV because the complete viruses have not been found, or if they are found, their levels are very low and they are unable to replicate.
The goal of this research is to find targets for the development of immunotherapies to ensure that most people with HIV manage to control the virus, as “persistent controllers” do, and therefore achieve a cure for the infection, the leader explained. the researcher of this study is Ezequiel Ruiz-Mateos.
The project, funded by ISCIII (contribution of more than 200,000 euros) and the biotechnology company Gilead (35,000 euros), was published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.