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Widely-used anti-alcoholism drug wakes up dormant HIV-infected cells
Gus Cairns, 2015-11-20 18:30:00
An Australian research team has found that disulfiram, a long-established and safe drug used primarily as a treatment for alcohol dependency (and well-known under its brand name Antabuse) can ‘wake up’ quiescent HIV-infected ‘reservoir’ cells and thus used as the first stage of a hypothetical cure for HIV.
The researchers found that doses of disulfiram up to four times larger than the licensed dose produced modest but sustained increases in HIV RNA inside reservoir cells; the largest dose also produced a doubling of the amount of HIV RNA outside cells, in the bloodstream.
This did not produce a viral load in any study participant detectable by standard tests, but is an indication that the cells in which HIV hides are being prodded into activity and thereby revealing themselves to the immune system.
Disulfiram, by itself or with other drugs, could be the first stage in a so-called ‘kick and kill’ proposed cure strategy. This involves getting the reservoir cells, whose HIV infection is invisible to the immune system when they are quiescent, to reveal themselves. The hope then is that they can either be picked off by the immune system or, more likely, by a therapeutic vaccine that pre-sensitises the immune system to them, or an antibody-based toxin that specifically seeks them out. See this report for some of the latest research ideas.
Principal Investigator Professor Sharon Lewin from the University of Melbourne commented that “The dosage of disulfiram we used provided more of a ‘tickle’ than a kick to the virus, but this could be enough.”
Source:1
