Researchers may have gotten one step closer to finding a solution to the HIV epidemic.
A group of Texas Tech and Harvard researchers have found a way to halt the spread of HIV through a new process called ribonucleic acid interference, or RNAi.
"RNA interference is a new gene silencing mechanism," said Premlata Shankar, who conducted the research while she was at Harvard University, but now works at Tech's Health Sciences Center in El Paso.
"It has generated a lot of interest because it's highly specific," she said. "It allows you to target individual genes."
Using mice that were infected with HIV, researchers were able to use RNAi to inhibit the expression of three genes in T cells, Shankar said. Inhibiting the expression of the genes protected the cells from HIV and prevented the virus from transferring to other cells.
This innovative process ultimately may supplement or replace the rigorous drug regimens that HIV patients are currently on, she said. Also, this potentially could reduce the side effects of typical drug treatments.
RNAi is the process of introducing a double-stranded RNA into a cell, which suppresses the expression of a gene, according to the MedicineNet Web site. The discovery of this process was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2006.
Even though HIV only infects humans, a team of scientists were able replicate the human immune system in the tested mice, Shankar said. This is the very first time researchers mirrored the disease in an animal model.
"There have been mice who have been made to be so immunodeficient that you can inject them with human stem cells and they actually take them and develop a human immune system," she said.
In addition to halting the spread of new cases of HIV in mice, the RNAi process was also able to ward off infections from preexisting cases of the virus, Shankar said.
"We took cells from HIV infected individuals - so they were already established infections - and injected them into the mice," she said, "and we still saw protection."
Even though there has been a lot progress made on the research, it will be at least five to 10 years before there will be clinical trial, said Priti Kumar, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. Researchers will run experiments on larger animals before they can start working on a dosage for humans.
"This is one of the first experiments of its kind and it's no way close to therapy," she said. "We will be moving up to bigger primates before we even consider humans."
The study is posted in the Aug. 7 issue of the online journal Cell.
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