New Therapy 'Cures' Monkey Of HIV

A new drug could be a breakthrough in the project to cure HIV, according to researchers. The combination of drugs helped stave off a monkey version of HIV for nearly two years after the animals stopped receiving treatments. Now they hope that the same solution could work for humans. Four weeks after the rhesus macaques were given the therapy, almost no simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) could be found in their blood or gastro-intestinal tissues. And two years later they appeared to be entirely healthy. The treatment takes standard HIV drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy or ART, and combines them with an experimental antibody that grows for the same target as an existing drug used to treat inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Tweaked slightly, it was used on SIV. A pilot trial of the effect of that drug, named vedolizumab, on HIV infected patients has already begun in the US. Scientist’s hope that will show that the therapy works in the same way it did on the monkeys in the study. Researchers have good reasons to believe that the therapy will work similarly in humans.