Immunotherapy Can Help HIV Patients

Immunotherapy has been considered potentially promising for many different kinds of cancers, and now there is fresh hope that the same method could be used to treat or functionally cure HIV.
These are the findings of a study published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’. Immunotherapy, also called biologic therapy, is a type of cancer treatment designed to boost the body’s natural defences to fight cancer. It uses substances either made by the body or in a laboratory to improve or restore immune system function.
They said during the clinical, The United States, U.S., researchers said they examined a total of 24 chronically HIVinfected participants in clinical trials conducted at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Reacting to the development, Senior Author, Pablo Tebas, who is director of the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit at Penn, said they found injections of one broadly neutralising HIV antibody (bNAb), known as VRC01, were safe.
He said it generated high levels of the antibody and modestly delayed the time of HIV viral rebound, but suppression did not surpass eight weeks in the majority of participants. Tebas said the study only looked at one antibody and they believe combinations of more potent bNAbs may help successfully control the AIDS virus.
“As a result, this method marks a first step toward the ultimate goal of durable suppression of HIV in the absence of antiretroviral therapy. For the near future, it is unlikely that we will be able to fully eradicate HIV once a person has been infected. But a functional cure is a reasonable intermediate goal,” he said.
Tebas said a functional HIV cure means that while the virus would still exist in a person’s body in extremely small amounts, virus replication would be durably suppressed, disease progression drastically slowed, and symptoms of infection stopped all without the need for daily medications.
He stressed that the goal of immunotherapy is to eliminate the need to take a pill every single day while simultaneously chipping away at the latent reservoir of virusinfected cells.
He, however, stressed that scientists are still years away from that goal. “If a person is able to be functionally cured of HIV, long-term follow-up will be essential to ensure that the virus doesn’t return to high levels.’’ Tebas said it was noted that many participants were also found to have