Globally, approximately 37 million people are carrying HIV virus which causes AIDS disease. Antiretroviral therapy (ART), the most common treatment of this disease, prevents this disease to advance and may let these people have a longer and healthy life. However, even in ART treatment, the virus can’t be expelled out of the body and continues to copy itself to infected cells’ DNA. This year, researchers defined a new approach to ART. This treatment, which is used with the CRISPR gene-editing technique, succeeds to completely exterminate all viruses in a mouse’s body and opened the gate to the treatments for HIV. To create a human infection in mice, researchers used “humanized mice” which produce immune cells that belong to humans. These human cells are naturally convenient for the HIV virus. When researchers injected HIV viruses into the mouse, it was observed that the infection settled to the points similar to humans; such as lymph nodes, spleen, liver, lungs, and brain. After that, researchers started using their newly developed treatment LASER ART treatment, which is long-termed and slow-releasing, to the mice. With the usage of retroviral nanoparticles which takes long to dissolve but can stay inside the body longer, it was possible to prevent the virus to spread. Researchers observed that weekly –rather than daily- usage of LASER ART can stop viruses to spread with the ratio of %99. However, similar to the ART treatment used in humans, this treatment couldn’t kill the viruses inside mice’s DNA too. As a last resort, scientists used the CRISPR gene-editing technique in order to separate viruses’ DNA from the genome it messed with. This process destroyed nearly %30 of all HIV viruses inside mice’ bodies. Kamel Khalili, who is one of the executives of the article published in Nature Communications says, “Our finding showed that HIV viruses could completely be cleaned from the infected cell for the first time”. According to Khalili, with these results, in a few years, we will be able to try the treatment in primates and finally humans.
Translation/Çeviri:
Deniz SOYLULAR
Source/Kaynak:
PopularScienceTürkiye Ocak 2020 sayısı, BilnetMatbaacılık ve Yayıncılık A.Ş. , Ümraniye-İstanbul, Ocak 2020
