Session on HIV Reservoirs a workshop
11:28 21.07.2010Viral reservoirs are a very interesting topic. With all the negative press coming out of this meeting on vaccines and the fact that antiretroviral drugs will suppress the virus but in its current state of knowledge will not cure the virus. The reason is the latent virus, or the virus that hides in the memory T cells of the blood, the brain, the G\i tract, and the lymph nodes. These virally infected T cells persist despite undetectable blood levels of the virus. To obtain a cure of the patient with \HIV, these cells will have to be eradicated.
How to do it is another question but most people of the know are now mildly encouraged that it will happen.
To do this there are a number of ways that the reservoirs could be attacked. (1) would be another drug that intensifies the current therapy of the patient. Most people think that will not work because the immune activation will not be stopped. Another way would be to purge the virus infected cells of the reservoirs. That means give an agent that starts these cells replicating, and then attack the replicating virus. But where what we are doing with Blue green algae might really come into play here. The one patient who was cured of the \HIV virus had acute lymphoma,along with HIV had his tumor eradicated but so was his bone marrow and then underwent a bone marrow transplant where stem cells were the main cell transplanted and the patient has now gone over 2 years. The ex dose of stem cells was the thing that made the person HIV free without any antiretroviral medication. It is here where blue green algae could be of major use in purging the reservoir. Antiretroviral therapy gets the viral load down to undetectable and then oral stem cells, blue green algae is used to boost the immune system and eliminate the last vestige of the virus. This is currently what are phase 2 trial is doing to test this hypotheses. There is no toxicity to blue green algae added to an antiretroviral drug in the patient we have tested.
