HIV treatment: A new drug developed

Since the discovery of HIV virus, scientists have been trying to find a better  HIV treatment. Although few antiretroviral drugs have been developed, they couldn’t give full hope to the patient.

Recently, a new drug “Gammora”  has been developed by Israeli scientists, which can eradicate up to 99% of HIV infected cells. The drug gammora in its first human trial has been succeeded to get this positive result.
Researchers of Zion Medical, an Israeli Biotech Company developed this drug and they proved that the drug can eliminate up to 99% of viral load even within first four week of treatment.

The drug is designed in such a way that it will destroy only HIV infected cells without causing any harm to healthy cells of the patient. The researchers synthesized a peptide named “gammora” from HIV-produced intrgrase enzyme. Intrgrase enzyme takes part in integrating the viral DNA into host cell genome. Gammora induces this enzyme to integrate multiple DNA fragments of HIV genome into the host cell genome in such a way that this integration causes apoptosis or self-destruction of infected host cells along with HIV virus.

In this research, different dose of gammora was given to 9 HIV-infected patients of Ronald Bata Memorial Hospital, Uganda. The trial was taken in two steps. In first step, there were more than 90% reduction of viral loads in case of most patient after four weeks of trial.

Second step were done two weeks later. In this step patients had been given a combination of Gammora and conventional antiretroviral drug for another four weeks.The result of second step of trial show that the combination therapy can eliminate 99% of HIV infected cells of the patients. Thus it proves that, Gammora can also boost the efficacy of conventional antiretroviral drug.

After 10 weeks of trial, the researchers demonstrate that the drug is safe, as it has no side effect.

 

Researchers also found that the drug is involved in boosting the level of CD4 T cells. As we know that, level of CD4 T cells drops in bloodstream after the infection of HIV virus. CD4 T cell are the helper T cells, that destroy harmful pathogens. As the level of this helper T cell decreases in the body of HIV patient, the patient experiences serious pathogenic illness and even falls in death due to low immune responses. But Gammora can boost CD4 T cell level up to 97% from baseline.

Since the drug is still under research and trial, scientists hope that curing HIV/AIDS with gammora is possible.

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