New HIV therapy helps boost immune systems
Researchers have found a way to boost the immune system of long-term HIV patients with a new therapy that will help them fight off potentially-fatal infections.
Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the team from Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, San Francisco, explained that the treatment doubled the number of immune cells in HIV patients' bodies.
HIV/Aids infection destroys immune cells and eventually causes the collapse of the entire immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to other infections. The researchers suggested that the treatment could go some way towards rebuilding the immune system.
Injecting patients with a growth hormone, they found that it caused the thymus, a gland which is often inactive in HIV patients, to produce T-cells, one of the vital components of the immune system.
"These results represent new proof-of-principle findings that thymic involution can be reversed in humans," said Dr Laura Napolitano, lead author of the study. "Improved T-cell production may be helpful for some medical conditions such as HIV disease or bone marrow transplantation."
The World Health Organisation estimates that approximately 0.6 per cent of the world's population is infected with HIV/Aids, which has been responsible for approximately 25 million deaths since it was first recognised in 1981.
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