First, they conducted a systematic, global analysis of all potential interactions that occur between proteins made by the body (human proteins) and proteins made by the virus (HIV proteins). Second, they whittled down these 500 interactions to the one that appeared most likely to fuel HIV infection – the interaction between human protein CBF? and HIV protein Vif.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people around the world since first being identified some 30 years ago. In the US alone, more than one million people live with HIV/AIDS at an annual cost of US dollars 34 billion.
Dr Krogan’s experiments show promise for the development of more effective antiretroviral therapies for people with HIV. Further, the scientists have laid the foundation for future research. In their experiments, the scientists performed a two-part investigation of protein interactions.

Normally during HIV infection, a restriction factor called APOBEC3G acts as a molecular roadblock, preventing the virus from reaching its target — the CD4 T white blood cells that are a major component of the immune system. But Dr Krogan found that when the HIV protein Vif binds to the human protein CBF?, Vif is strengthened and APOBEC3G degrades.
This degradation weakens ABOBEC3G’s ability to stop HIV and the virus is free to infect the CD4 T cells. “This is the first comprehensive look at how HIV interacts globally with components of the cell,” said Judith H Greenberg of National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

“One of the keys to HIV’s success is how quickly it can evolve new attack strategies — and the way in which it uses our own proteins against us is a prime example of that,” said Dr Krogan. He added: “However, now that we’ve shed light on this complex process, we are one step closer to developing new drugs that will help us pull ahead in this evolutionary arms race.”

German scientists have discovered a substance known as a peptide that thwarts the AIDS virus and causes far fewer side-effects than existing anti-HIV drugs, they said on Wednesday.

The breakthrough was reported in the science journal Science Translational Medicine after it had been tested on 18 AIDS patients.

But the scientists at Hanover university hospital or MHH in northern Germany said they are yet to find a way to put the substance, VIR-576, in a pill. All the test patients received it as an intravenous drip.

Variants of the new therapy could also be devised to fight measles, hepatitis C and Ebola disease, they said.

VIR-576 is a protein that smothers human immunodeficiency virus, stopping it docking with cells in the human body.

“It is a completely new therapy approach which we hope will reduce side effects,” said Mr Reinhold E Schmidt of MHH. Other existing medicines offered since the mid-1990s work by proofing cells of the body against the virus.

“Our peptide works on the virus, not on the cells, so some of the side-effects won’t happen at all,” he said.

Current anti-AIDS medications ensure an almost normal life span for HIV-infected people but raise the risk of strokes and liver damage. VIR-576 caused some diarrhoea, but no other major side effects, the tests suggested.

Mr Schmidt cautioned that it could take years before VIR-576 was available from pharmacies as a medicine.

Stem Cell Transplant Cures HIV In ‘Berlin Patient’

On the heels of World AIDS Day comes a stunning medical breakthrough: Doctors believe an HIV-positive man who underwent a stem cell transplant has been cured as a result of the procedure.

Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient,” received the transplant in 2007 as part of a lengthy treatment course for leukemia. His doctors recently published a report in the journal Blood affirming that the results of extensive testing “strongly suggest that cure of HIV infection has been achieved.” Brown’s case paves a path for constructing a permanent cure for HIV through genetically-engineered stem cells. Dr. Thomas Quinn, director of Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health told FoxNews.com that he is very familiar with the “Berlin patient” case.
“This was a new report that looked much deeper into whether HIV could still be present or lurking in the body in some way, not cured, and since the transplant he remains viral free and his cells appear to be resistant to infection,” he said.
Quinn said he agrees with the researchers on this case that it would be qualified as the first HIV cure, opening the door to alternative means of curing HIV.
“He [Brown] has been without therapy for three years and appears to be free of the virus,” he said. “It gives hope to the millions of people infected with HIV that cure is a feasible option in the future.”
Even though Brown’s procedure proved to be successful, Quinn also warns that this was a rare case and a bone marrow transplant is not a cure-all for other HIV patients.
“It is a near fatal procedure that he had to have done because of the leukemia, but this procedure is very expensive and you have to be transplanted with a donor who is shown to be already resistant to HIV,” Quinn said. “You’re asking for a tall order to replicate this in the future.” Brown’s case was published in a February 2009 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine

American scientists have created HIV-resistant cells that could one day pave the way for controlling the virus without using harsh anti-retroviral drugs.
Scientists at the Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California, used mice to test the cells that target one of the two “gateway” molecules that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) uses to enter human cells, Meghan Lewit, spokeswoman for the team of researchers, said.
The researchers modified blood stem cells to make them resistant to HIV and then transplanted them into the mice, enabling the rodents to control the infection.
If the approach can be applied to humans, it could enable a long-term generation of HIV-resistant cells in the body, providing the potential for the patient’s cells to suppress HIV, Lewit said.
“This hybrid gene and stem cell therapy show that it is possible to create HIV-resistant immune cells that can eventually win the battle against HIV,” Paula Cannon, principal investigator and associate professor of molecular microbiology and immunology, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
“We’ve done it at the scale of a mouse, and the challenge now is to see if this can be done at the scale of a human patient.” “The strategy arose from the observation that people with a mutation in a gene called CCR5 are naturally resistant to infection with the most common strains of HIV and do not develop AIDS,” Lewit said. Researchers used enzymes to knock out the CCR5 gene in human blood stem cells, and then transplanted the modified stem cells into mice, Lewit said. The cells developed into mature cells of the human immune system, including the T cells that HIV infects. And when they infected the mice with HIV, the animals were able to maintain normal levels of the human T cells and suppress HIV. “By engineering CCR5-deficient stem cells, we may allow a patient to produce HIV-resistant cells in all of the cell types that the virus infects, and for long periods of time,” Cannon said. “If successful, it could one day allow patients to control their HIV without needing to take anti-retroviral drugs.”

Giving antiretroviral drugs to HIV-infected mothers or giving HIV-fighting syrups to their babies are both effective in preventing transmission of virus through breastfeeding, a major international study has found.

“Our study found that both methods are effective in preventing HIV transmission. The antiretroviral regimen for treating the mothers is much more expensive and requires access to medical facilities that aren’t widely available in developing countries such as Malawi. The baby regimen, in comparison, is incredibly cheap and much easier to implement. These findings are important because each year about 200,000 infants worldwide become infected with HIV through breastfeeding, and in the developing world infant formula is both prohibitively expensive and associated with increased infant deaths,” the study’s author Charles van der Horst said.

In the study, 2,369 breastfeeding mother-infant pairs in Malawi, were randomly assigned to one of three groups – a maternal antiretroviral therapy (ART) group, a second group in which infants were treated with nevirapine liquid and control group for whom medications were given at the time of delivery only.

None of these women had developed a maternal antiretroviral therapy yet and thus did not need treatment for their own health. After their babies were born, women in the maternal antiretroviral group received a single tablet twice a day containing the drugs zidovudine and lamivudine.

They also received a dose of nevirapine by mouth once a day for 14 days and then twice daily from 2 to 28 weeks.

The end of smallpox vaccination in the mid-20th century may
have contributed to the rapid spread of HIV, a new study says. Smallpox immunisation was gradually withdrawn from the 1950s to the 1970s following the worldwide eradication of the disease, and HIV has been spreading since about the same time period. Researchers looked at the ability of white blood cells taken from people recently immunised with vaccinia (cowpox virus used to vaccinate against smallpox) to support HIV replication. They found significantly lower HIV replication in blood cells from such individuals. Raymond Weinstein, lab scientist at the George Mason University, said: “There have been several proposed explanations for the rapid spread of HIV in Africa, including wars, the reuse of unsterilised needles and the contamination of early batches of polio
vaccine.” “However, all of these have been either disproved or do not sufficiently explain the behaviour of the HIV pandemic.” “Our finding that prior immunisation with vaccinia virus may provide an individual with
some degree of protection to subsequent HIV infection suggests that the withdrawal of such vaccination may be a partial explanation,” said Weinstein. Weinstein worked with a team from George Washington University and University of
California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Weinstein and his colleagues propose that vaccination may confer protection against HIV by producing long-term alterations in the immune system, said a George Mason release. These findings were published in BMC Immunology.

By using medications packaged just like fast-food ketchup, HIV-positive mothers in developing countries can more easily provide protection to newborn babies born at home.
Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a cheap, easy-to-use system that allows mothers to give their newborns a potentially life-saving dose of an anti-HIV medication shortly after birth. In order to be effective, the drug, known as Nevirapine, must be given to the newborn  within days of birth. The challenge to date has been reaching distant mothers who give birth at home. Since most mothers are not up to travelling that soon after delivery to get medication, biomedical engineers developed a way of providing the medication in a simple manner and with a long shelf life — pouches made of foil and plastic that can hold a single dose of Nevirapine. “In Africa, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that more than 90 percent of 430,000 new cases of AIDS in 2008 were attributable to mother-to-child transmission,” said Carolina Gamache, programme coordinator in senior researcher Robert Malkin’s
Developing World Healthcare Technology Laboratory at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. “A single dose of Nevirapine right after birth has been shown to be effective in protecting the baby from the virus, but it has been difficult for many reasons to make this option available to women who give birth at home,” said Gamache, according to a Duke release. Gamache presented the results of the Duke research in London at the Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Developing Countries conference, which is sponsored by the WHO and the Institute of Engineering and Technology.

A potent new inhibitor of HIV, derived from bananas, may open the door to new treatments to prevent sexual transmission of HIV, according to a recently published study.

Scientists have an emerging interest in lectins, naturally occurring chemicals in plants, because of their ability to halt the chain of reaction that leads to a variety of infections.

In laboratory tests, BanLec, the lectin found in bananas, was as potent as two current anti-HIV drugs.

New ways of stopping the spread of HIV are vitally needed. The rate of new HIV infections is outpacing the rate of new patients getting anti-retroviral drugs by 2.5 to 1, and at present it appears an effective vaccine is years away.

“HIV is still rampant in the US and the explosion in poorer countries continues to be a bad problem because of tremendous human suffering and the cost of treating it,” says study author David Marvovitz, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan (U-M).

The new research describes the complex actions of lectins and their ability to outsmart HIV. Lectins are sugar-binding proteins. They can identify foreign invaders like a virus.

The research team discovered that BanLec can inhibit HIV infection by binding to the sugar-rich HIV-1 envelope protein, gp120, and block its entry to the body.

“The problem with some HIV drugs is that the virus can mutate and become resistant, but that’s much harder to do in the presence of lectins,” says lead author Michael D. Swanson.

In a welcome news for HIV patients, Canadian and American researchers have found new ways to increase effectiveness of the current drugs to fight the deadly disease.

Currently, HIV/AIDS patients are treated with highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) that involves at least three active anti-retroviral medications. The HAART ‘cocktail’ is suppresses viral replication in the blood.

Although HAART delays the progression of AIDS and prolongs life, it does not lead to cure of the disease.

But now researchers from Montreal University , McGill University , and the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute of Florida (VGTI) have published a new study that may lead to an expansion of the role of the current drug arsenal used to fight HIV.

The joint study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, shows how the pivotal role of two molecules, PD-1 and IL-10, can influence the function of CD4/T-helper cells and alter their ability to fight HIV, a statement by Montreal University said Monday.

“Our findings show that the membrane protein PD-1 is up-regulated during HIV infection by the release of bacterial products from the gut and this subsequently increases the production of a cell derived factor, IL-10 that paralyses the immune system,” lead author Rafick-Pierre Sekaly has been quoted as saying.

” We are the first to show that these two molecules work together to shut down the function of CD4 T-cells in HIV patients. This in turn, may lead to paralysis of the immune system and an accelerated disease progression.

“Our results suggest that it is important to block both IL-10 and PD-1 interactions to restore the immune response during HIV infection,” said Sekaly.

“We believe that immunotherapies that target PD-1 and IL-10 should be part of the arsenal used to restore immune function in HIV-infected subjects,” he added.

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Some people infected with AIDS control the progression of their illness naturally as they develop high levels of a specific molecule, a new study shows.

The authors of the study, from Spain, said the state of the molecule called ALPHA-DEFENSINAS 1-3 is associated with better control and slower progression of the disease, says a Prensa Latina report.

Approximately, five percent of the HIV positive people do not need anti-retroviral therapy as they can regulate the infection by means of the molecule, a mechanism that should be investigated, the specialists said.

The discovery opens a new path in the search for therapeutic alternatives to control AIDS, magazine Plus One reported recently.

“If we are able to stimulate the segregation of these molecules, we can get patients under control of the disease by themselves,” according to the specialists.

The experiment lasted three years, in which experts chose healthy people who were not infected by AIDS and patients infected with HIV-1.

The patients were classified in several teams, according to their personal capacity to control the progression of the disease.