Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - August 14, 2005
Bonnie Eslinger, beslinger@examiner.com
Researchers at Mission Bay's The Gladstone Institutes are using novel drugs to wake up dormant HIV cells that appear invisible, but threaten to activate.
Working as an affiliate of University of California, San Francisco, The Gladstone Institute's work is similar to that done by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who have tested the ability of valproic acid to reduce the number of infected dormant cells. The highly publicized study was published this week in The Lancet medical journal.
Latent HIV cells make up a small percentage of those within an infected patient, but if left untreated they can undermine the success of other treatments, said Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology Associate Director Dr. Eric Verdin.
"Essentially these cells look entirely normal, the body does not recognize them as foreign and the drugs cannot touch them," said Verdin. "You can treat the patient with the best drugs available, but if you stop therapy, you're left with this subset of cells and they always have the potential to wake up."
Verdin said while some scientists are working on ways to keep the cells suppressed, Gladstone Institute researchers are trying a different approach by forcing cells to activate, so they can be eliminated along with the other infected cells.
One of the main differences between the UCSF and the University of North Carolina studies, said Verdin, is that the North Carolina study was done in patients already infected with HIV, while The Gladstone Institutes' are done in a lab with cells intentionally infected, which allows more cells to be looked at.
In addition, researchers for The Gladstone Institutes will be embarking in a new, alternate study this year that will test multiple drugs on the dormant cells, said Verdin.
Skeptics, including other AIDS researchers, say that if all of the hidden cells aren't found, the treatment will be ineffective, because even one latent cell can multiply quickly.
"We cannot say this can't be done until we've tried everything," said Verdin.
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