A team of French researchers (the CNRS, Inserm, the University of Montpellier, the Pasteur Institute, the AP-HP) working within the framework of the National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis comes from make a major discovery about the AIDS virus.
If the disease is incurable, until now, HIV-positive people, that is to say carriers of the HIV virus, survive and lead a near-normal life thanks to a triple therapy prescribed very early.
That was not counting the results of research conducted by Monsef Benkirane, a virologist at the University of Montpellier. the latter are indeed able to identify the cells in which the HIV virus survives in the "dormant" state - they strongly resemble healthy homologous cells.
A discovery that could finally cure HIV
They are called CD4 T-reservoir cells. The virus can hide for about 15 years before the disease starts again if one stops treatment. Following tests on 12 patients carrying the virus and on therapy, the researchers noticed that only the infected cells had a sign that distinguished them from healthy cells: they all carry a protein on their surface, the CD32A protein.
"This discovery paves the way for a better fundamental knowledge of viral reservoirs," says the French research institute CNRS, which participated in this work published Wednesday, March 15 in the scientific journal Nature . "In the longer term, it should lead to therapeutic strategies to eliminate the latent virus from the body."
"Since 1996, we dreamed of killing these cells, but we had no way of doing so because we had no way of recognizing them," says Benkirane. Remarks by virologist Steven Deeks of the University of California at San Francisco, who hopes that this new track will accelerate research on ways of healing.
AIDS: current treatments
Before the first tritherapies arrived in 1996, HIV-positive people developed what is known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Their immune defenses eventually collapsed, leaving the door open to various infections and the development of more serious diseases, such as cancers, which surely led patients to death.
Tritherapies have changed the game, even reducing the amount of virus in the blood, called the viral load, which then becomes almost undetectable.
If the treatments are still heavy and still cause undesirable effects - headache, nausea, appearance of red patches on the body, etc.-, the number of tablets prescribed to patients has greatly decreased: from about 20 tablets to 5 to take daily.
In prevention, since January 2016, France proposes the molecule of Truvada in hospital. This can be prescribed to avoid being infected with HIV in the case of unsafe sex.
AIDS screening: self test and blood test
AIDS self-tests are also available in French pharmacies. With a drop of blood, the self-test provides a result in 15 minutes, against several days of waiting in a screening center.
To note: it can not in any case to replace the traditional screening (blood test), being not 100 % reliable, its result must indeed be imperatively confirmed by a laboratory test.
