Closer to a Cure by Tricking HIV

University of Victoria biomedical engineer Stephanie Willerth, a faculty member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Division of Medical Sciences, carried out a groundbreaking research, that has made a significant contribution to understanding HIV and its treatment.

Along with her team, Willerth has studied, for the first time ever, almost 15,000 different variations of the HIV virus.

This titanesque work has allowed them to locate certain genes of the virus which were resistant to drugs, fueling hope for the development of a more effective treatment against HIV.

The special part about this study is that the methods Willerth says she has used, can be applied to other difficult-to-treat viruses like Ebola, swine flu, influenza and even staph infections.

She explains that “to study all of these different versions we have to replicate them millions of times, especially when it comes to complex viruses like HIV.

“Because this research method requires a large amount of genetic material and there are obvious risks of duplicating highly contagious viruses, scientists have avoided doing this.

“Our research was unique because of the method we used—we isolated the genetic material from HIV, so that it was no longer alive, before we replicated it.

“The virus mutates at a very high rate which is very problematic for HIV patients because the virus eventually develops resistance to medications,” adds Willerth.

Once the researchers replicated the virus from a small sample collected from a long-term HIV patient, who had developed drug resistance to their treatment, they studied its genetic make-up thanks to 'next generation' DNA sequencing.

This is a new method that allows researchers to study millions of molecules at a time, and it is a huge advancement since, according to estimates, 38 million people worldwide are infected with HIV and 4.1 million more add up each year.

Therefore the necessity to learn more about the way that the virus mutates and becomes resistant to medications, in order to develop treatment therapies that are effective over the long-term.

Willerth conducted this post-doctorate research at the University of California Berkeley Lab.