A second genetic mutation providing natural immunity against HIV has been discovered. Although it remains very rare, it nevertheless represents new hope for developing new anti-HIV drugs.
New hope could help science move forward in the fight against HIV-AIDS. An extremely rare genetic mutation, responsible for a muscular disease, would create a natural immunity against the AIDS virus, was discovered in the same family in Spain. It concerns the gene (Transportin-3 or TNPO3). The disease, affecting a hundred people, is called muscular dystrophy type 1F belts.
It is a group of Spanish researchers who made the link between the two conditions, in works published in the American magazine PLOS Pathogens. The gene responsible for the disease also plays a key role in transporting the virus inside the cells of the sick. The team of geneticists in Madrid tried to infect a sample of the blood of a patient with HIV. The result is promising, AIDS is failing to affect these cells.
"It helps us to understand the transport of the virus in the cell much better," says José Alcami, the virologist at the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid. The project leader who made this discovery continues: "There are still many things we do not know well. For example, it is not known why 5% of patients who are infected do not develop AIDS. There are mechanisms of resistance to infection that we understand very badly.
Already in 2012, a very rare mutation found another way to help the 37 million HIV-positive people in the world. The "Berlin patient," Timothy Brown, was cured of HIV by a stem cell transplant containing a rare mutation in the CCR5 gene. However, the latter also confers natural immunity against the virus. It has since been studied as a way to block the road to the virus.
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