HIV cellular gene therapy
HIV immunotherapy has passed the first phase of clinical trials
Immune cells with modified DNA successfully took root in the body of HIV-infected people and began to fight the infection without causing side effects. This is written by American molecular biologists who published an article in the journal Molecular Therapy.
"Our main goal is to "teach" the body to fight HIV infection on its own. We have proved that editing the DNA of immune cells does not pose a danger to the patient's body. The data obtained during the first phase of clinical trials will help us improve HIV immunotherapy," said David Margolis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA).
The immunodeficiency virus penetrates into human cells using a set of several proteins on the surface of its shell. Their structure and the structure of the hydrocarbon "shield" protecting them changes with each new generation of HIV, which forces the immune system to produce a new set of antibodies. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the virus becomes the winner in this "arms race", and this same feature prevents scientists from creating a vaccine or vaccination against HIV.
As immunologists explain, 3-4 years after HIV infection, the human immune system often begins to synthesize so-called broad-spectrum antibodies (bNAbs), capable of neutralizing several varieties of the virus at once. This does not help the body much, since by this time the virus will already have time to penetrate deeply into all the tissues of the body and go into the chronic stage, and the immune system will irreversibly weaken.
Accordingly, as Margolis notes, this problem can be overcome if immune cells are "trained" to produce such antibodies much earlier than the depletion of immunity occurs, and they are preemptively introduced into the body in large quantities.
A year ago, biologists from the University of Pennsylvania conducted the first such experiment, modifying the DNA of these bodies in such a way that they began to produce antibodies that make HIV particles "visible" to the immune system.
The successful completion of animal experiments opened the way for clinical trials on volunteers infected with HIV and constantly taking antiretroviral drugs. At the first stage of these experiments, scientists tested how the ingress of immune cells with modified DNA would affect their well-being and health.
Having gathered a group of seven volunteers, the scientists fished out "adult" T-cells from blood samples, selected the most active of them, "inciting" them to fragments of HIV shells, after which they modified their DNA and multiplied them. Having received a sufficient number of corpuscles, biologists injected them back into the blood of patients and began monitoring changes in their condition.
As these experiments have shown, cloned T-cells have successfully taken root in the body of patients, without causing severe inflammation and other dangerous side effects. Since all participants in the experiments did not stop taking antiretroviral drugs, immune therapy did not significantly change the number of viral particles in their body.
Nevertheless, experiments on their blood samples showed that the immune cells of the volunteers began to fight the virus much more actively, capturing and destroying its particles and killing "infected" cells coated with a coating of HIV shells. All this, according to Margolis, opens the way for testing the effectiveness of such therapy in the second phase of clinical trials using a larger number of T cells.
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