Drug found to be safe
On the bright side, the research demonstrated that Vorinostat is safe to use with HIV-positive patients at doses that can effectively shock cells. The researchers have already begun trials pairing Vorinostat with drugs that might be able to kill the shocked cells. There is a high safety standard for these trials because the participants have their HIV level under control and are generally healthy.
But it’s still not clear if the shock is effective enough if all the reservoir is being activated. The researchers stress that it will likely be a long time before effective treatments are available. And because the treatment involves activating HIV, it will, at least at first, only be available to those who have their viral load under control.
Sharon Lewin, who researches HIV latency at the University of Melbourne and was not associated with this study, told VOA she wished the researchers had used more methods to measure whether the cells were being shocked. “You can measure virus inside the cell and you can measure virus that’s being released from the cell,” she said. “They measure virus just inside the cell.”
It is possible that the cell is producing HIV, but that the HIV virus isn’t leaving the cell. If so, that could explain why the cells aren’t dying.
Treatment successes are few
HIV has been eliminated in a handful of people. At least two infants who received aggressive treatment within hours of contracting HIV never developed viral reservoirs. One man in Germany has been HIV-free for several years following a pair of bone marrow transplants he received during cancer treatment. This has failed in other patients though, and bone marrow transplants are life-threatening procedures.
Lewin said other approaches to eliminating HIV, like editing a person’s genome, or aggressive early treatment, would not be as widely available as a shock and kill approach.
“Those are approaches that will be difficult to roll out to the 37 million people living with HIV,” said Lewin. “An approach that’s just tablets, and tablets that are relatively cheap, that is an approach that could be available.”
Article Appeared @https://www.voanews.com/a/research-tries-shock-and-kill-to-eliminate-hiv/3947967.html