VATIS UPDATE Article

In new research, scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM), the United States, and the University of Pittsburgh, the United States, showed that they can excise HIV DNA from the genomes of living animals to eliminate further infection. They are the first to perform the feat in three different animal models, including a “humanized” model in which mice were transplanted with human immune cells and infected with the virus.

The team is the first to demonstrate that HIV-1 replication can be completely shut down and the virus eliminated from infected cells in animals with a powerful gene editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. The new work builds on a previous proof-of-concept study, in which the researchers used transgenic rat and mouse models with HIV-1 DNA incorporated into the genome of every tissue of the animals’ bodies.

They demonstrated that their strategy could delete the targeted fragments of HIV-1 from the genome in most tissues in the experimental animals. The team genetically inactivated HIV-1 in transgenic mice, reducing the RNA expression of viral genes by roughly 60 to 95 percent. They then tested their system in mice acutely infected with EcoHIV, the mouse equivalent of human HIV-1.