UNC Scientists, Researchers Making Strides Toward HIV Cure

Around 1.1 million people are living with HIV in the United States. Currently, those with the virus take antiretroviral therapy, which can suppress HIV to undetectable levels in blood. Unfortunately, the virus still persists in the body through latent, or hidden, infected cells.

For several years, scientists have been trying to bring latent HIV cells out of dormancy so they can become visible to the immune system. This would allow an antiviral immune response to kill the virus-infected cells. But because the immune system cannot recognize these cells, no current therapies can eliminate them.

Richard Dunham and his team at Qura Therapeutics are hoping to change that.

“HIV can hide even while the antiretroviral drugs are suppressing the infection.” Dunham said. “So if you stop taking your drugs, the infection comes right back. Our objective is to cure the individual, to get read of the virus that is hiding.”

Dunham is the director of HIV Cure at ViiV Healthcare and one of the co-authors of this new research. He helped introduce a new compound that “activates” these infected cells.

“What we’re doing is to try to push that hidden virus out of its hiding place,” he said, “so that it can be seen by the immune system and eliminated,” Dunham said.

Together, ViiV Healthcare and scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill make up Qura Therapeutics. This partnership conducted investigations that expedited this work in mice and primates.

Dunham said the formation of Qura Therapeutics five years ago has provided a new and unusual interface between academia and industry.

“I think that collaboration between ViiV and UNC,” he said, “and our partners outside of here at Emory and beyond, was really essential to getting this project off the ground and making such rapid progress.”

According to Dunham, this collaborative research is ground-breaking in the medical field, as it’s taking a new approach to curing a long-standing problem.

“Finding a cure for HIV has taken this long because it’s a really complex problem,” said Dunahm. “There’s a lot of moving parts. We first had to understand that antiretroviral could be quite effective at prolonging the life-span and preventing aids but weren’t going to cure the virus. Then we had to understand the basic biology of this latent, hidden virus well enough that we knew how to push it out of hiding.”

Dunham said while this research shows promise for eventually curing HIV, they still have a lot of ground to cover. Qura Therapeutics is currently pursuing a new compound with the hope of safely studying its effect on humans in 2021.

UNC Scientists, Researchers Making Strides Toward HIV Cure

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