A team of British scientists might be on the brink of developing a cure for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). According to a report in The Sunday Times, the researchers recently tested their pioneering treatment on the first of 50 participants in a clinical trial.
Early tests on the first patient, a 44-year-old British social worker, show the virus is undetectable in the man’s blood. HIV is a virus that attacks the immune system, the body’s natural defence system. Without a strong immune system, the body has trouble fighting off disease.
Both the virus and the infection it causes are called HIV. White blood cells are an important part of the immune system. HIV is mainly transmitted through sexual acts or by using infected needles.
The virus weakens a person’s immune system by destroying important Tcells that fight disease and infection. About 36.7 million people are living with HIV worldwide, according to the United States, U.S., Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Around 2.1 million new cases were added in 2015, with nearly two-thirds of new infections occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa, the CDC reported. HIV prevalence is relatively low in Nigeria but its large population means that 3.5 million people are living with HIV as at 2015.
If left untreated, HIV can lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Around 1.1 million people died from AIDS-related illnesses last year. In his reaction, Mark Samuels of Britain’s National Institute for Health Research, said: “This is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV. We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV.” Samuels added. “This is a huge challenge and it’s still early days, but the progress has been remarkable.”
Britain’s National Health Service is backing the clinical trials, which are the result of collaboration between the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, University College London and King’s College London.
The trial’s first patient, who said he was gay but did not give his name, said he participated in the trial to help others with the disease. While antiretroviral therapies can help control HIV’s effects on people’s immune system, no effective cure exists yet. The British researchers’ potential cure would mirror the effects of antiretroviral therapies in some ways. In untreated patients, the HIV hijacks T-cells and turns them into virus-producing spawn that infect other T-cells.
Antiretroviral therapies target and suppress this activity, but they still leave millions of dormant, infected T-cells lying in wait throughout the body. The Sunday Times reported that the new treatment would both suppress infections and kill the reservoir of dormant cells.
Sarah Fidler, a consultant physician and professor at Imperial College London, said medical tests of the potentially breakthrough therapy would continue for the next five years. “It has worked in the laboratory and there is good evidence it will work in humans too,” Fidler said. “But we must stress that we are still a long way from any actual therapy.”
