Newswise This has been a good week for breakthroughs in HIV/AIDS.
Earlier this week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a daily pill, Truvada, which reduces the risk of HIV infection. Today, a University of Nebraska Medical Center research teams progress toward developing weekly or twice-monthly injectable antiretroviral therapy (ART) nanomedicines for patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection will be highlighted as the cover story in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
A long-acting, nanoformulated ART (nanoART) would be a substantive improvement over daily and sometimes more complex regimen of pills, said Howard Gendelman, M.D., the lead investigator on the development of nanoART for HIV/AIDS and professor and chairman of the department of pharmacology and experimental neuroscience (PEN) at UNMC.
The journal article hails the successful testing of UNMCs ART injectables as treatment of HIV-infected mice and in preventing new infections.
We actually followed the process exactly as we would with a person and it worked, Dr. Gendelman said. This is all very exciting. Although there are clear pitfalls ahead and the medicines are not yet ready for human use, the progress is undeniable.
Dr. Gendelman said one of the projects real advantages is in the nanoformulations. NanoART is cell directed, he said. So when you take a pill, the pill travels throughout the body indiscriminately. In these nanomedicines, you can use the bodys own cells to direct the medicine where you want it to go.
The UNMC project directs the medicine to the monocyte-macrophage, cells which carry the drug particle to sites of the body specifically where HIV grows.
Youre using the cell that is the target for the virus to deliver the drug against the virus, Dr. Gendelman said.
Dr. Gendelman calls the progress made a Nebraska invention, as it involved so many of the states scientists in different disciplines working together. He said this marks the third article his team has had published in major biomedical journals in recent months with all the articles related to the nanomedicine injectable therapy.
The advance to use the new nanomedicines to specifically target reservoirs for viral infection was explained by Georgette Kanmogne, Ph.D., associate professor in PEN, lead investigator, and published in the International Journal of Nanomedicine. This paper describes how these drug inventions can enter the brain and ameliorate nervous system disease.
Read more:
HIV Injection Could Someday Replace Daily Pill Regimen