American geneticists have been able to defeat HIV in animals

    image

    Researchers from medical school them. Lewis Katz at Temple University announced victory over the human immunodeficiency virus with the help of genetic engineering. They managed to remove the DNA of the virus from the body of the animal. This is a critical step towards creating HIV treatment.

    Immunodeficiency virus was first discovered in the early 1980s. It is infectious and is transmitted through the biological fluids of an infected person to a healthy one through damage to the skin or mucous membrane. Geneticists found that the virus first formed somewhere around the 1920s in Western and Central Africa south of the Sahara, and was transmitted from monkeys to humans. The very first recorded case of the appearance of HIV in the blood is dated 1959 - it was then that blood was taken from the patient, in which this virus was later found.

    The virus causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome - it infects the cells of the immune system, as a result of which it ceases to function normally and cannot successfully fight diseases.

    The current therapy of the virus involves the use of several drugs that suppress the progression of the disease (antiretroviral therapy). And if, without it, death occurs on average 9–11 years after infection, then when taking drugs the patient’s life expectancy is 70–80 years, which is comparable to the average duration in many countries. However, drugs cannot cure the virus - it builds its DNA into the cells of the body, and thus reproduces its copies.

    But recently, one of the most actively developing genetic technologies is CRISPR-Cas9, which uses the Cas9 protein and allows editing the genome of a living organism. It appeared quite recently, in 2012, but has already established itself as simple and effective. With its help in the laboratories they edited the genome of mice, fruit flies, nematodes, and others.

    This technology is excellent for combating the HIV-1 virus subtype (the most common and pathogenic species). It has already been successfully tested on living cells . In this paper, scientists have experimented on transgenic rats and mice, in which the virus was integrated into the genome of every cell in the body. The viral vector of adeno-associated virus was used to edit the genes.(recombinant adeno-associated viral, rAAV).

    Two weeks after the organization of the delivery of genes by the virus, the scientists examined tissue collected from experimental animals. The study showed that the virus was successfully cut from all tissues of the body, including the brain, heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, lungs and blood cells. Treatment significantly reduced the amount of RNA virus in lymphocytes, which indicates the critical impact of technology on the virus.

    “The ability of the rAAV system to penetrate many organs, including those containing the HIV-1 genome, and edit virus DNA is an important sign that our strategy can avoid virus reactivation from newly infected cells and, potentially, serve as a treatment for patients with HIV”, - Dr. Kamel Khalili explained, the lead researcher in the work.

    Now scientists plan to test their technology on larger groups of experimental animals. Human clinical trials may begin in a few years.

    Also popular now: