Supercharging Immune Cells May Help Long-Term HIV Suppression

Cancer miracle drugs that affect making the patient’s immune cells It is also being developed for HIV, and the first results from two people show its promise for long-term treatment of the virus.

As part of a clinical trial, scientists took immune cells from people and re-engineered them in the lab to recognize and attack HIV in the body. After a single infusion of the modified cells, two people with HIV now have undetectable levels of the virus—one for about two years and the other for about a year. All can stop taking HIV drugs.

The two people are part of a small study to test the safety and efficacy of the drug. The first results were announced last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy in Boston.

“These are early days. If we can provide evidence that this method is safe and effective, then there are many ways to solve it, to make it cheaper and easier,” says Steven Deeks, professor of medicine and HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the trial.

This method, known as CAR-T cell therapy, has been used thousands of patients and cancers that are difficult to treat. Half a dozen or so have been approved that rely on the method. The drug actually supercharges the immune system of the human body to directly attack and eliminate cancer cells. Recently, it is also used successfully in medicine chronic autoimmune disease.

“This is very exciting,” says Andrea Gramatica, vice president of research at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, who was not involved in the trial. “The reason this research is important and so important is because it provides real information about the HIV virus that teaching the immune system to control the virus without antiretroviral drugs is possible.”

Scientists have been searching for a cure for HIV since the virus was discovered in the early 1980s. Antiretroviral drugs prevent the spread of AIDS by suppressing the virus to an undetectable level, but people must take the drugs for the rest of their lives. It has turned HIV into a chronic disease that allows people to live a shorter life. However, not everyone who is infected with HIV knows about their condition, and in some rural and low-income areas of the world, the drug is still not available or affordable.

So far, there are under twelve written charges permanent remission of HIV-so-called “active cure” because the virus is still present in the body but is suppressed to a level unknown by the immune system and HIV drugs are no longer needed.

Each of these people had cancer and received stem cell transplants as part of their treatment. In all but one of those eventsdoctors used stem cells from donors with a rare mutation called CCR5 that naturally prevents HIV from entering and infecting healthy cells. Timothy Ray Brown, known as the “Berlin patient,” was the first known person to be cured of HIV in this way in 2008.

Examples of sustained remission “have taught us that the immune system can, under the right conditions, eliminate HIV,” says Boro Dropulić, director of the nonprofit Maryland Caring Cross, which developed the CAR-T HIV treatment.

But stem cell transplants will not increase, he says. It is a complex process that carries serious risks such as graft-versus-host disease, where the transplanted cells recognize the host’s cells as foreign and attack them.

“What we are trying to do is to deliberately set this up without needing cancer, without needing a donor,” says Dropulić. His organization is working to make advanced therapies such as CAR-T more accessible and affordable.