Times Live Blog: Promising results in blocking HIV during first days of infection: M2010
Promising results in blocking HIV during first days of infection: M2010
By Claire Keeton (Times Live Blog) 24 May 2010: Two pilot studies to test an innovative way to block SIV (the monkey version of HIV) infection early on are showing encouraging results, Dr Ashley Hasse told a plenary session this morning at the M2010 Microbicides conference in Pittsburgh.
Hasse said that glycerol monolaurate (GML) had protected eight out of 11 rhesus macaques from infection after a high-dose challenge, compared to three out of 11 among the control group.
“GML is efficacious, safe, cheap and could be formulated to encourage adherence,” he said. “GML represents a new opportunity to block HIV at the portal of entry.”
But this approach would work only in the first few days of infection before the virus has a chance to spread through the body leading to systemic infection.
“The maximum opportunity (to stop HIV) is in the mucosal and sub-mucosal tissues,” he said.
Microbicides are being developed for this, to be applied topically in the vagina or rectum.
“The second chance is if you can prevent local expansion of the virus (via the genital lymph nodes and bloodstream).”
Hasse said, for example, that GML is intended to inhibit the body’s innate inflammatory response to viral infection – and in this way block an influx of new CD4+ T cells for the virus to infect.
HIV (or SIV) needs the influx of new target cells to expand beyond its small founder population of HIV, which are in clusters, and without these new cells it cannot spread effectively, he said.