Makerere University researchers have started a study in which they are trying to find a permanent cure for HIV.
Based at the Makerere University Walter Reed Project (MUWRP), the researchers are joining other scientists based in the US to explore whether a strategy dubbed Block, Lock, and Excise can help them defeat the virus that has so far had no vaccine despite over 30 years of research.
Dr Betty Mwesigwa, the Deputy Executive Director of Makerere University’s Walter Reed Project, told URN that with this strategy, they are currently in the laboratory developing chemicals or programmed epi-genetics that will help them make the virus inactive and then wipe it out of the body, something they have coined as Block, Lock, and Excise.
Mwesigwa says first, they want to establish where exactly the virus hides in the body. This means, she says, they will first block it from within the reservoirs where it hides, make it sleep, which is scientifically defined as remission, and then erase it from the body, which is, in this case, excising. This study is scheduled to last five years.
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Later, they will move into human trials if the laboratory studies show promising results. However, even before the study goes far, it has excited people living with HIV and activists. For instance, Moses Nsubuga, an activist who has been on treatment for over 20 years, said this study gives hope, especially to people on third-line treatment who are worried about what will happen to them once their last line of treatment fails.
He added that even if current treatment can give one a near-normal life with the ability to live free of opportunistic infections, they live with the risk of developing serious complications like liver damage, and a cure would be the only solution for this.
However, while this is the first study of its kind to try HIV obstruction by programmed epi-genetics in Africa, a number of other strategies are being tried, including gene therapy, immunotherapy, and a slightly similar strategy to the one that is set to be studied, which is called shock and kill.
In this study, scientists used drugs to awaken hidden viruses in the reservoirs and then kill them, but the research collapsed when study participants started developing serious side effects, and yet they also established that they were not eliminating all the viruses in the body with the strategy.
The new study is funded by the US-based National Institutes of Health (NIH).
