Potential new HIV drug may help patients not responding to...(three had undetectable viral loads (fewe...)

The researchers took blood samples at six and 13 days. After six days, only three of the macaques had detectable SIV levels and after 13 days the virus could only be found in two of them, at very low levels (below 1,000 copies of the virus per millilitre of blood). The researchers repeated the research in eight macaques that were not being treated with ART but this time they found no change in viral load over 13 days.

Dr Adriano Boasso from Imperial College London said: "HIV can have a devastating effect on people's lives but with advances in Anti-Retroviral Therapy it is becoming a more chronic, manageable disease. Unfortunately, treatment does not work for everyone - some people develop resistance to the drugs and when that happens, we start to run out of options for treating them and delaying the onset of AIDS.

"Our early findings suggest that D-1mT could be used alongside antiretroviral therapy to stop the virus from replicating. The disease can only progress if the virus is replicating, so if we can slow replication down we can reduce the impact of the disease on the patient's life. We still need to figure out how D-1mT is working, then we can think about developing this as a potential treatment for HIV," added Dr Boasso.

The results of the new study surprised the researchers because D-1mT did not appear to work in the way they had expected. They had believed it might reactivate the immune system, because D-1mT is able to block an enzyme called IDO, which HIV and SIV use to hold the immune system back. In healthy people, IDO prevents the immune system from attacking the body. HIV and SIV hijack the machinery that makes IDO and use it to stop the immune system from attacking them.

In the new study, the researchers could find no evidence that D-1mT reactivated the immune response against SIV, a
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