Alcoholism May Hold The Drug Cure For HIV

 

A drug that’s used to treat alcoholism has been found to activate dormant HIV cells, dragging them out of hiding so they can be destroyed. When given to 30 HIV positive patients in the US and Australia in a three-day trial, the common anti-alcohol drug, disulfiram, appears to ‘wake up’ HIV cells without causing any harmful side-effects. 

HIV has an ability to stay dormant in the body by integration into the DNA of the cells of a host, resting in what is known as a latent state.

While there are antiretroviral drugs available to reduce the total HIV burden of a patient, maintain function of their immune system and prevent infections that could and often lead to death, retroviral drugs only attack HIV that is actively replicating.

In this study, 30 patents undergoing antiretroviral therapy were given disulfiram over a period of three days. In this time, the patients were given progressively higher doses of the drug.

While the first two dosages (500 and 1000 mg) did not produce any measured effect, after the highest dose of 2000 mg was given on the last day, researchers found evidence that dormant HIV was being re-activated. Seven days after this last dose, the amount of virus RNA found in a patient’s blood was found to have increased 70 percent. At the 30-day mark, this amount increased 100 percent.

Even though the drug was only given for three days, since the amount of virus RNA observed in the blood plasma showed a clear increase, it suggests the treatment was working as desired.

Scientists had already identified a class of drugs called histone deacetylase that can kick dormant HIV into gear, but they inflict too many toxic side effects to be a viable treatment option. That’s what makes disulfiram so promising - no harmful side-effects have been detected.

Current antiretroviral drugs can keep HIV in the blood in check, but patients have to take them for the rest of their lives in case the dormant virus re-emerges. Disulfiram appears to flush everything out into the open, which is just the first step in the search for a cure.

The drug was administered without seeing any side effects. This is important since toxicity is a big concern amongst other drugs that are being evaluated for bringing out HIV from hiding.

Researchers said the success of disulfiram is that is does not shock the HIV from hiding, as do many other treatments being developed. Disulfiram provides HIV with a slight tickle that seems to be all it needs to open up.

“Disulfiram may be suited for future studies of combination and prolonged therapy to activate latent HIV,” the researchers wrote. This means that the next step will be to test the HIV-awakening effects of disulfiram in combination with other drugs specifically designed to kill the virus.

"This is a very important step as we have demonstrated we can wake up the sleeping virus with a safe medicine that is easily taken orally once a day. Now we need to work out how to get rid of the infected cell. A kick-start to the immune system might help," one of the team, Julian Elliott from the University of Melbourne, said in a press release. "We have an enormous amount still to learn about how to ultimately eradicate this very smart virus."