Low-dose nano drug HIVCide to stop all HIV types shows promise

HIVCide, a new nano drug to prevent all types of HIV infection that leads to AIDS is currently being tested successfully.

Currently available anti-HIV drugs are capable of stopping only select strains of HIV infection.

It has been a formidable challenge for researchers in the field to develop an anti-HIV drug that works against all subtypes and strains.

Several anti-HIV drugs and drug candidates have demonstrated significant activity against only one of these various HIV-1 subtypes.

In addition, HIV mutates, changing its genome and protein structure during an active infection.

Mutants resistant to the patients’ treatment drugs can develop and proliferate, leading to failure of therapy, including the Highly Active Anti-retroviral Therapy (HAART) regimen using multiple anti-HIV drugs for years.

NanoViricides, Inc has created special purpose nanomaterials for HIV therapy. The Company’s novel nanoviricide class of drug candidates are designed to specifically attack enveloped virus particles and to dismantle them.

NanoViricides has previously reported that several of its nanoviricide drug candidates were more than 25 times (2,500%) superior to a three-drug HAART cocktail in a standard  mouse model study of HIV-I infection.

In particular, treatment with only 150 mg/kg nanoviricides, as opposed to 4,200 mg/kg HAART drug cocktail (i.e. 28 times greater total dosage of HAART cocktail) resulted in viral load decrease that was equal to or better than HAART, and increased double-positive CD4+/CD8+ T cell counts that were equal to or better than HAART.

The nanoviricides were equal or superior to the HAART cocktail in all parameters evaluated.

Significantly, the nanoviricide treatment was given only during the first week in this six-week anti-HIV study, whereas HAART treatment was continued daily, the company said in a press release.

NanoViricides, Inc reported that its anti-HIV drug candidates demonstrated efficacy in the recently completed cell culture studies using two distinctly different HIV-1 isolates. The studies were performed in the laboratory of Carol Lackman-Smith at the Southern Research Institute, Frederick, Maryland.

This cell culture study found a subset of the anti-HIV nanoviricides tested in cell culture models at Southern Research had very similar activity against two distinctly different isolates of HIV-1, viz. Ba-L and IIIB. The Company had designed the ligands using reported gp120 structures of several HIV-1 strains.

This virus binds and infects cells expressing the human receptor CCR5 in addition to the well known receptor CD4.

HIV-1 IIIB is a CXCR4-tropic virus that infects cells expressing the human receptor CXCR4 in addition to the receptor CD4. HIV that binds to CD4 results in productive infection leading to disease, and eventually AIDS.

“We believe that our strategy of designing ligands that are close mimics of the invariant binding site on CD4 has resulted in nanoviricides that are active against multiple HIV-1 subtypes,” stated Anil R. Diwan, PhD, president of nanoviricides.

The results of the Southern Research study suggested that mutations in HIV-1 may be unlikely to result in significant resistance to an anti-HIV nanoviricide, he added.

Southern Research is a nonprofit 501(c) 3 scientific research organization that conducts preclinical drug discovery and development, and advanced engineering research in materials, systems development, environment and energy.

NanoViricides is developing drugs against a number of viral diseases including H1N1 swine flu, H5N1 bird flu, seasonal Influenza, HIV, oral and genital herpes, viral diseases of the eye including EKC and herpes keratitis, hepatitis C, Rabies, dengue fever, and Ebola virus.