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NAIROBI: Scientists have made strides in the fight against HIV with the discovery of a new method that can treat the pandemic.
A study conducted by the Fred Hutch Research Centre in the United States has revealed that use of immunotherapy, a common method in treating cancer can also be applied to cure HIV.
The researchers have argued that immunotherapy that harnesses the immune system against cancer could also cure or provide a long-term remission for HIV.
Virologist Dr Larry Corey said that Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CAR) T cells in humans "have the potential of killing HIV infected cells."
"Twenty years ago, they were tried for HIV(with minimal success) but now we know how to do them better," said Corey
In this method, an individual's T cell (type of white blood cell that searches out and destroys pathogens) is genetically re-engineered with antigen receptors (or CAR) to kill cancer cells bearing a particular shape or marker.
Currently, there are dozens of clinical trials underway at Fred Hutch and elsewhere of CAR T cells for leukemia and lymphoma, with promising results.
"Now, building on advances made in cancer and other diseases, we are revisiting these and other approaches that engage the immune system to go after HIV," said Corey.
Hutch Research Centre has consequently received a second five year funding of Sh70 million (USD 69.2 million) courtesy of Dr Amit Sharma who was awarded the funding for his efforts in coming up HIV vaccine.
The funding is meant to explore other immunotherapies against like therapeutic vaccine and oversee genetically engineering of synthetically produced neutralizing antibodies.
The scientists are said to already have proof that the immune system can cure HIV or at least drive it into long-term remission.
So far, only one person has been cured through the method (Timothy Brown) who got treated rather accidentally some nine years ago as his immediate threat was blood cancer, leukemia that forced him to undergo a bone marrow transplant.
He is so far the only person globally to have been treated of the AIDS causing virus.
Corey further noted that scientists had earlier tried T-cell therapies against HIV without much success.
"Just as bone marrow transplantation provided the first definitive example of the human immune system's power to tame (and even cure cancer), it did the same for the first and so far only HIV cure," reads the study in part.
Even with such global strides, it will be long before it reaches Kenyans who some have been left out of the badly needed anti-retroviral therapy treatment.
A recent study released July 2016 report by Lancet noted that less than 40 per cent of the almost two million Kenyans living with HIV can access ARV treatment.
It also stated that HIV infections had increased steadily in the last decade at 7.1 per cent annually. However, HIV related deaths have decreased by half to 51,000 in 2015.
Currently United States is the biggest financier of Kenya's HIV programmes with a recent injection of over Sh50 billion through the President Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) mean to increase ARV coverage by 100,000 annually.
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