Posted on Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Abbott announced on March 2 that a team of scientists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) discovered an unusually high number of people who tested positive for HIV antibodies but had low or undetectable viral loads without any treatment. antiretroviral. These people are called elite HIV controllers. These groundbreaking findings, published today in EBioMedicine (part of The Lancet journal), could help researchers discover new biological characteristics in this population, leading to breakthroughs in the discovery of treatments for HIV. – and possibly vaccines.
Researchers from Abbott, Johns Hopkins University, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases at the University of Missouri (Kansas City) and the Protestant University of Congo found that the prevalence of elite HIV controllers was 2.7 to 4.3% in the DRC against 0.1 to 2% in the world. This new research will feed into further studies aimed at understanding this unique immune response. The results could bring researchers closer to their goal of eradicating the HIV pandemic by highlighting links between the natural disappearance of the virus and future treatments.
“The discovery of a large group of elite HIV controllers in the DRC is significant, given that AIDS is a chronic disease that lasts a lifetime and usually progresses over time,” said Dr Tom Quinn, director of the Johns Hopkins Center and head of the international HIV / AIDS research section of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Health, and one of the study’s authors. “There have been rare cases where the infection has not progressed in individuals prior to this study, but this unusually high frequency implies that something of interest is happening at a physiological level in the DRC that does not is not without reason ”.
Since the start of the global AIDS pandemic, 76 million people have been infected with HIV and 38 million people are now living with the virus. As the first company to develop an HIV test approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over thirty years ago, Abbott understands the importance of HIV research and has established its global viral surveillance program to identify mutations in HIV and hepatitis viruses – keeping its diagnostic tests progressing. The origins of the HIV pandemic were established in sub-Saharan Africa, more precisely in the DRC, this region is therefore of particular interest to the scientific community.3, 4 These new discoveries by Abbott researchers and partners are a continuation of the virus hunting efforts that led to the identification of a new strain of HIV in 2019.
“The global surveillance work keeps us one step ahead of emerging infectious diseases and here we realized that we had found something that could be one step closer to finding a cure for HIV.” said Michael Berg, associate infectious disease researcher at Abbott and one of the study’s authors. “The global research community has more work to do, but using what we learn from this study and sharing it with other researchers brings us closer to new treatments that could potentially eliminate HIV.”
Plasma samples collected in 1987, 2001 to 2003 and 2017 to 2019 in the DRC (where the oldest known strains of HIV were discovered) allowed researchers to rule out causes of an undetectable viral load in 10,457 patients from 2017 to 2019: false positives, biases relating to the collection site, great genetic diversity and antiretroviral treatment. Abbott reagents, ARCHITECT HIV Ag / Ab Combo and m2000 RealTime HIV-1 were used in the study to detect anti-HIV antibodies and viral loads in participants, respectively.
“Each new discovery of HIV is another piece of the evolutionary puzzle that we are trying to figure out,” said Carole McArthur, MD, professor in the department of oral and craniofacial sciences at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. , director of pathology research at the Truman Medical Center, and one of the study’s authors. “Each of these pieces helps us see a little more clearly where we need to look next and contributes to the knowledge bank that all researchers will turn to in the next phase of our work.”
Source : Abbott
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