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Researchers: 3 proteins may keep some from AIDSSome infected with HIV don't develop symptoms
From Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN)
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The mystery of why nearly 2 percent of people infected with HIV never develop AIDS symptoms appears to have been cleared up, a team of researchers said Wednesday. For nearly 20 years, scientists have been trying to figure out what makes such people -- called "long-term non-progressors" -- different from the rest of the HIV positive population. Using a protein chip analysis system, researchers at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center said they found that non-progressors have three elusive proteins -- called alpha-defensin 1, 2, 3 -- that inhibit the replication of the HIV virus. The proteins may explain why some people infected with the HIV virus live significantly longer without ever developing AIDS, the scientists said. "This is a major step forward in our understanding of how the body fights HIV," said Dr. Linqui Zhang, the lead author of the paper in the journal Science. "This question has been in the field bothering people for the last 16 years." "The game plan now is to figure out whether we could take this discovery and work on it and translate it into something that would be practically useful for patients," said Dr. David Ho, head of the laboratory where the research was conducted. The team has already made a synthetic version of the proteins which turned out to be too weak to be useful. And there's hope the proteins could be taken from non-progressors and somehow given to others. Whether that is possible is unclear at the moment. "It is too preliminary to even speculate that this will even have any impact on treatment," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. First, the research must be verified and those efforts are already under way. It's only then that researchers can determine if these tiny proteins can lead to better treatments. Zhang hopes the discovery can "open up a new avenue of research" at least. Indeed, although this is a huge advance for researchers, a cure for patients is still not within reach. "The odds are against us and the obstacles are huge," Ho said when asked about the possibility of finding a cure. "In order to cure, you have to shut HIV down completely and we have pretty good drugs that are saving lives but we don't have drugs that will completely block HIV 100 percent. Until we do so, a cure is not in sight."
Dr. Susan Little, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, says interest in non-progressors and their immune systems has been there all along and that "huge emphasis" in research is placed on figuring out what keeps these people symptom-free. Unlocking the mystery is becoming more urgent as time goes on. Patients are managing their disease and living longer with the help of drug cocktails. Meanwhile, few new drugs to mix into such cocktails are being developed. According to Little, complacency among the general public and drug resistance -- a problem that worsens the longer the drugs are used -- are problematic. One in five people newly infected with HIV have resistant strains "right off the bat," she said. But she adds that research has grown by leaps and bounds, "A lot of the immunology studies that have been done in the last few years that seem like breakthroughs weren't possible five or 10 years ago because technically we didn't know how to do the studies."
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