Researchers have made an important step in AIDS field by creating a new HIV strain that infects a species of rhesus monkeys, thus improving researchers’ ability to evaluate potential strategies for preventing and treating the disease.

 

The study appeared in the March 2, 2009 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Until now, researchers used monkeys infected with simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, a virus very similar to HIV, but far from a perfect research tool. The new strain could eventually make it easier to test drugs and vaccines for the life-threatening virus.

 

“If you want to make a vaccine against HIV, then the vaccine you’re going to use in humans almost certainly will not work against SIV in animals. You have to make a parallel vaccine based on SIV to test in the animals, and then take a leap of faith that you can extrapolate that to HIV,” Paul Bieniasz of the Rockefeller University in New York, one of the researchers, said.

 

The new virus, stHIV-1, spreads almost as quickly after injection as HIV-1 initially does in humans and it persists for several months, after which it is controlled. It does not make the monkeys sick. Instead, it behaves as HIV does in some people whose exceptional immune systems are generally able to keep the virus in check. These people are called long-term nonprogressors.

 

That is exactly what researchers are going to study: the mechanism of long-term non-progression.  The next step is developing of an HIV strain that produces full-blown AIDS in this species of monkeys, allowing researchers to test treatments for that stage of the disease.

 

“We're not saying we can save the world with antiretroviral pills. But this model will allow us to start studying the best way to administer prophylaxis and do other experiments on preventing HIV-1 infection that could not be easily done on humans,” says Bieniasz.