The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is an incurable, lifetime infection because doctors have been having a hard time trying to eradicate the virus from the patient's system. Now, a group of Danish researchers have successfully found a way to expose HIV virus cells that are hiding inside the patient's healthy cells.
Dr. Ole Søgaard is a member of the Danish team from the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark and he gave an account of how they conducted the study on six HIV-positive patients using a cancer drug that was able to expose HIV from its hiding places and "kick it out" into the patient's bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, the patient's immune system can theoretically attack the virus and defend the body from the infection.
Each of the subjects were given three doses of the cancer drug, Romidepsin, over the course of three weeks to find out if it would be successful in removing the virus out of the cell reservoirs where they typically cannot be detected. All the subjects who were chosen for the study were long-term HIV patients who stayed on their anti-retroviral treatment during the trials. Prior to the administration of Romidepsin, Dr. Søgaard said that the HIV was undetectable in all the other systems. However, within days of receiving the drug, there were significant amounts of HIV that had moved into the bloodstream.
"We could see that within a very short time, 1 to 3 days, we could measure a large increase in the number of viral particles. So these cells are going from being in a resting state to exposing themselves to the immune system." Furthermore, Dr. Søgaard said that although the virus was not destroyed by the patients' immune systems, this new discovery will soon be combined with an experimental vaccine against HIV, called Vacc-4X, to determine if it can stimulate an immune response that is strong enough to kill the virus.
This discovery was presented at the 20th international AIDS conference in Melbourne and was recognized as the most important advancement to have come out of the gathering. The conference was attended by thousands of HIV experts from all over the world who came together to share their research in an effort to bring the world closer to finding a cure.