Till date AIDS retains the status of an incurable disease and no vaccine has been developed to treat it. There are about 25 million people who have succumbed to this deadly disease since 1980 and there are 35 million people who are infected with it. Till now the most effective method of controlling AIDS is to give the victim an anti-retroviral treatment after making him/her undergo the PEP (Post-exposure prophylaxis) program, which is an elaborate method spanning four weeks in which the patient has to face a lot of discomfiture. The side effects that may be nausea, diarrhea, fatigue or malaise will surely prove to be highly taxing on the bodily resources and dispositions of the victims. It is sad but true to realize that just like the treatments for other life threatening diseases, the treatment for AIDS with anti-retroviral drugs is an expensive affair and beyond the reach of the common man.
Keeping these aspects in view, Stephen Kent along with his colleagues from the University of Melbourne, Australia developed the Overlapping Peptide-pulsed Autologous Cells (OPAL) treatment which is an immunotherapy technique. In the laboratory experiment, the AIDS virus cells termed peptides (protein fragments) were placed along with blood cells and isolated immunity cells from the infected person, in lab dishes. It was observed that the immunity cells were able to recognize the viral cells better. This vaccine is to be introduced into the blood of HIV patients. Consequently, the immune cells will be able to combat the virus and take control of it more efficiently than the other types of AIDS/HIV treatments.
According to the information from PLoS Pathogens journal of the Public Library of Science, this experiment was conducted on monkeys with SIV(Simian Immunodeficiency Virus that is similar to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in functionality and effect). It was observed that the CD4-T cells (the main immunity cells for combating the HIV/SIV virus) that are generally incapacitated by the HIV/SIV virus were found to increase in number in leaps and bounds after the administration of this vaccine. The viral levels were ten times lesser in the SIV infected monkeys that were administered the vaccine compared to the SIV infected monkeys that were not given the vaccine. The good news is that the effect lasted for almost over a year after the initial vaccinations. The plans to conduct this immunotherapy experiment on humans are under development.
This treatment seems to be more effective than other forms of treatment as vaccines can definitely work better than drugs (as they fight the enemy by starting off as a part of it). However, the OPAL treatment is again just a way to control the AIDS pathogen and not a complete cure. So, we still have to look for something that can cure the disease completely. Moreover, this form of treatment requires administration of the vaccine as soon as the virus infects the human being. This proves to be a grave limitation for OPAL treatment because it is almost impossible to detect the virus before three weeks of the onset of the infection (even in the HIV 1 stage).
via: REUTERS
