virus Special Forces. Dendritic cells are brought against SIV and ready for injection.
To prolong the lives of AIDS patients, doctors rely on a battery of antiviral drugs with side effects that are often as damaging as those of chemotherapy. An alternative long sought to antiviral medication is immunotherapy, in which immune cells specific to a patient are removed, trained to fight against the virus, and are returned to the bloodstream to mount an attack. Reporting in the January issue of Nature Medicine , Wei Lu and colleagues from the University of Paris described the first use of immunotherapy to successfully treat AIDS in monkeys.
HIV virus evades the immune system by hiding inside the same cells that normally fight infection - T cells - and causes AIDS by killing them slowly, opening the door for opportunistic infections and cancers. Lu's team has tried to counter this Trojan attack in 14 macaque monkeys infected with SIV - a relative of HIV that causes AIDS in nonhuman primates - by growing dendritic cells monkeys, cell Scouts seize foreign agents from the bloodstream and present them to T cells to trigger immune responses. The researchers incubated dendritic cells with SIV treated with AT-2, a chemical that makes the virus harmless by permanently blocking viral replication, and then they returned these cells formed SIV monkey's bloodstreams.
Lu said 'd just hoped to find a measurable effect of this immunotherapy on SIV infection, but he was surprised by how effective it was. Within 10 days, SIV viral load in infected monkeys was 1 / 50th of that of controls, and remained at this low level for the 34-week study. At best, said Lu, antiviral drugs reduce the viral load of less than five times and must be taken daily for life. the number of T cells in these monkeys have also increased to healthy numbers.
"It will be very important to follow these animals for a longer period," warns Bruce Walker, a biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. One of the "major obstacles" using the immunotherapy for the treatment of AIDS in humans, he said, is the constant area evolution of the virus due to its rapid mutation rate, allowing some viral variants slip past the immune system.
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