The approach appears to have worked well in test subjects thus far

Dec 3, 2013 14:28 GMT  ·  By

A new way of removing the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from infected patients may have been developed at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York. Researchers here say that radioimmunotherapy (RIT) was successfully used in a new study to kill off HIV.

The patients who received RIT had already received standard antiretroviral therapy beforehand, which put a dent in the virus' defenses. The radioactive particles that came next were able to successfully clean the remaining HIV from infected cells.

These results potentially open the door to new types of strategies for addressing HIV infections and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Official statistics from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) show that 35.3 million people had HIV in 2012, and that the virus produced a total of 1.6 million deaths worldwide.

As such, developing a new method of complementing highly-active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), which is currently the norm in treating AIDS, could have significant repercussions on a global scale.

Details of how the RIT therapy works were presented today, December 3, at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The research group says that, even though HAART is effective in reducing the number of HIV cells in the body, it cannot completely eradicate the virus.

Reservoirs of latent, infected cells remain within the body at all times, which is why a complete cure is impossible. The AECM group believes that applying RIT to patients whose infections have been brought under control could be the extra push needed to completely destroy HIV, Science Blog reports.

“In an HIV patient on HAART, drugs suppress viral replication, which means they keep the number of viral particles in a patient’s bloodstream very low. However, HAART cannot kill the HIV-infected cells,” explains Ekaterina Dadachova, PhD, the lead author of the new paper.

“Any strategy for curing HIV infection must include a method to eliminate viral-infected cells,” adds the expert, who holds an appointment as a professor of radiology, microbiology and immunology at the College of Medicine.