Vorinostat Helps Purge Hidden HIV Virus

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has successfully flushed latent HIV from hiding, with a drug used to treat certain types of lymphoma. In recent years, eliminating latent HIV in the immune system has been thought to be critical to finding a cure for HIV. The results were presented at the 19th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Seattle, Washington.

The new study, led by David Margolis, MD, professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology, and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the first to demonstrate that the biological mechanism that keeps the HIV virus hidden and protected from current antiviral therapies can be targeted and interrupted in humans, providing new hope for a strategy to eradicate HIV completely.

In a clinical trial, six HIV-infected men who were medically stable on antiretroviral drugs, received vorinostat an oncology drug. Recent studies by Margolis and others have shown that vorinostat also attacks the enzymes that keep HIV hiding in certain CD4+ T-cells, the immune system cells that the virus uses to replicate. Within hours of receiving the vorinostat, all six patients had a significant increase in HIV RNA in these cells, evidence that the virus was being forced out of its hiding place.

“This proves for the first time that there are ways to specifically treat viral latency, the first step towards curing HIV infection,” said Margolis. “It shows that this class of drugs, HDAC inhibitors, can attack persistent virus. Vorinostat may not be the magic bullet, but this success shows us a new way to test drugs to target latency, and suggests that we can build a path that may lead to a cure.”

To read more, please visit: http://www.sciguru.com/newsitem/13155/Drug-Vorinostat-helps-purge-hidden-HIV-virus-study-shows.

The Friends of AIDS Foundation is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.

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