Hopes of HIV cure breakthrough

According to widely circulated reports published on Monday, scientists have apparently found a way of cleaning the remnants of the HIV virus from the bodies of infected persons who have been on antiretroviral treatment for the disease.The scientists used radioimmunotherapy, or RIT, to destroy remaining human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected cells in the blood samples of […]

According to widely circulated reports published on Monday, scientists have apparently found a way of cleaning the remnants of the HIV virus from the bodies of infected persons who have been on antiretroviral treatment for the disease.
The scientists used radioimmunotherapy, or RIT, to destroy remaining human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected cells in the blood samples of patients treated with antiretroviral therapy, offering the promise of a strategy for curing HIV infection.
According to the reports based on the scientists’ submission, Ekaterina Dadachova from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, United States, and a team of researchers administered RIT to blood samples from 15 HIV patients treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART).
RIT, which has historically been employed to treat cancer, uses monoclonal antibodies – cloned cells that are recruited by the immune system to identify and neutralise antigens.
“In RIT, the antibodies bind to the infected cells and kill them by radiation. When HAART and RIT are used together, they kill the virus and the infected cells, respectively,” the study’s lead author, Dadachova, was quoted as saying. The research team paired the monoclonal antibody designed to target a protein expressed on the surface of HIV-infected cells with the radionuclide.
They found that RIT was able to kill HIV-infected lymphocytes previously treated with HAART, reducing the HIV infection in the blood samples to undetectable levels.
“The elimination of HIV-infected cells with RIT was profound and specific. The radionuclide we used delivered radiation only to HIV-infected cells without damaging nearby cells,” Dadachova said.
An important part of the study tested the ability of the radiolabelled antibody to reach HIV-infected cells in the brain and central nervous system. Using an in-vitro human blood brain barrier model, the researchers demonstrated this radiolabelled antibody could cross the blood brain barrier and kill HIV-infected cells without any overt damage to the barrier itself.
If clinical application confirms the findings of this research, it would mark a significant achievement in the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic that has claimed millions of victims globally, most of them in developing countries, especially those in Africa. Millions more live with the disease. Governments all over the world should take great interests in the progress of the study and its clinical trial. This is important given the well-known penchant of multinational drug manufacturers to seize on such potentials with a view to patenting them and claiming control over the sale and distribution of any therapeutic drug, to make harder and expensive to obtain.
Here is a big opportunity for African countries to put into practice the resolutions of the special summit of the African Union that took place in Abuja in July this year. They could liaise with the United Nations, which supported the Abuja summit, to key into the clinical trial process of this new research, and be among the first to make the resulting therapy easily accessible to the people.
There is no timeline on when this process would be concluded if indeed a cure comes within reach; but it would be prudent to keep abreast of the stages of its development because, for Nigeria at least, a positive outcome would make it far easier to achieve President Goodluck Jonathan’s objective of testing 80 million Nigerians of 15 years and above to know their HIV status as part of a strategy to check the diseases’ spread in the country.  
Halting, and eventually defeating the HIV scourge would be a monumental victory for mankind, perhaps more profound than the effects and fallouts of World War I and World War II.  If this potential breakthrough is to be that, governments and institutions all over the world must support it to bring about the results that everyone desires.