Breakthrough provides potential cure for HIV

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Chicago: In a breakthrough that could potentially lead to a cure for HIV infection, scientists have discovered a way to remove the virus from infected cells, a new study said. The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine on Thursday.

The enzyme is still far from being ready to use as a treatment, the authors warned, but it offers a glimmer of hope for the more than 40 million people infected worldwide.
A customised enzyme that effectively excises integrated HIV-1 from infected cells in vitro might one day help to eradicate (the) virus from AIDS patients,” Alan Engelman, of US-based Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, wrote in an article accompanying the study.

What makes HIV so deadly is its ability to insert itself into the body’s cells and force those cells to produce new infection.

“Consequently the virus becomes inextricably linked to the host, making it virtually impossible to ‘cure’ AIDS patients of their HIV-1 infection,” Engelman explained.

That could change if the enzyme, developed by a group of German scientists, is made safe for human use. That enzyme has eliminated the HIV virus from infected human cells in three months in the laboratory.

The researchers engineered an enzyme called Tre which removes the virus from the genome of infected cells by recognising and then recombining the structure of the virus’s DNA.

This ability to recognise HIV’s DNA might one day help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to finding a cure: The ability of the HIV virus to avoid detection by reverting to a resting state within infected cells which then cease to produce the virus for months or even years.

“Numerous attempts have been made to activate these cells, with the hope that such strategies would sensitise the accompanying viruses to antiviral drugs, leading to virus eradication,” Engelman wrote. “Advances with such approaches in patients have been slow.”

New experiments must be designed to see if the Tre enzyme can be used to recognise these dormant infected cells, he wrote.

“The most important, and likely most difficult, among these is that the enzyme would need efficient and safe means of delivery and would have to be able to function without adverse side effects,” wrote lead author Indrani Sarkar of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany.

“Nevertheless the results we present offer an early proof of principal for this type of approach, which we speculate might form a useful basis for the development of future HIV therapies,” Sarkar added.

“The enzymatic removal of integrated HIV-1 from human chromosomes is a current-day reality,” Engelman concluded.


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