HKU claims to have developed new drug to prevent and treat HIV
A team from Hong Kong University (HKU) claimed on Thursday that they have invented an antibody drug that can effectively prevent human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections and eliminate infected cells in mice.
After eight years’ research, the team, led by Professor Chen Zhiwei, director of HKU’s Aids Institute, found that by injecting the drug, which is an engineered tandem bispecific broadly neutralizing antibody's named ‘BiIA-SG’, to humanized mice, HIV particles can be blocked from entering target cells, making it impossible to be infected with the virus, according to a press release by HKU.
Currently, patients who are infected with HIV need to take a combination of three anti-retroviral drugs every day to suppress the virus, otherwise the “level of the virus would rebound”, Chen said at a press conference.
But in the research, when the drug is injected into a group of infected mice, it was found that the viral load dropped significantly to “an almost undetectable level” for at least four weeks before 58 percent of the mice exhibited signs of a viral rebound, which leads to a promising efficacy of eliminating HIV-I infected cells in humanized mice - rodents which carry human genes, tissues and cells.
The research team’s goal, Chen said, was to lengthen the period of protection offered by its new antibody drug.
However, the team has so far only tested the drug on mice, but is now looking to experiment on larger animals such as monkeys, before conducting clinical trials on humans.
The findings of the study have been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a peer-reviewed biomedical research journal published by the American Society for Clinical Investigation.