Promising results in new treatment for HIV
The latest technique has only been tried in 10 people, but according to reports the results appear to have long-term promise.
The treatment involves taking the immune CD4-positive T cells, which HIV targets, out of the infected person’s body, modifying them to make them more aggressive, and then putting them back. Usually HIV is able to sneak inside these cells and wipe them out.
By modifying them outside the body with a process known as co-stimulation – priming them for action – and then putting them back into the patient’s body, they are able to do their job again properly.
Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers reported that the treatment successfully kept HIV levels down for a period of several months.
Also, the cells that had been modified seemed to be reproducing inside the patient’s body, suggesting that protection might be long-term.
Further studies are now being conducted which will yield more information into whether this kind of treatment could prove a useful addition to the drugs already in use.
South African health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told a media briefing in parliament last year that her department was looking seriously at supplying natural medication that boosted the immune systems of people living with HIV/AIDS.
Author
Free to Share
Related
