The 10 Leading Patient Engagement Solution Providers in 2018 Leading Patient Engagement small | Page 24

Immunotherapy
What makes HIV so dangerous is
that it a acks the immune
system, leaving people
unprotected against infec ons.
But what if we could supercharge
immune cells to fight back?
That's the reasoning behind
immunotherapies. Researchers
reported last year that thanks to
an immunotherapy that primes
the immune system against the
virus, 7 out of 15 pa ents were
cured. Their approach combines
a drug to ac vate the hidden HIV
reservoir with a vaccine that can
induce an immune response
thousands of mes stronger than
usual.
Gene therapy
It is es mated that about 1% of
the people in the world are
naturally immune to HIV. The
reason is a gene c muta on on
the gene that encodes CCR5, a
protein on the surface of
immune cells that the HIV virus
uses to enter and infect them.
People with this muta on are
missing part of the CCR5 protein,
making it impossible for HIV to
bind to it. Using gene therapy, it
would, in theory, be possible to
edit our DNA and introduce this
muta on to stop HIV. In the
future, gene therapy for HIV
could be done with CRISPR, a
gene edi ng tool that is much
easier and faster to make. Its
poten al in HIV has already been
shown in vitro, and soon HIV
could become of the first
diseases to be cured with CRISPR.
When will we have an HIV cure?
Although there are several approaches that could eventually bring a functional HIV cure, there are still some
challenges ahead. One of the biggest concerns around any HIV treatments is the virus' ability to quickly mutate and
develop resistance, and for many of these new approaches there is still no data on whether the virus will be able to
become resistant. So far, none of these functional cures have reached late-stage clinical testing, meaning it doesn’t
seem likely that we will meet the goal of having an HIV cure by 2020.
22 | December 2018