Technology | Out with the Old, In with the New

WRITTEN BY MDPN. JOHN EUCLID PARREÑO | POSTER BY MDPN. FRANCIS BALDEMOR

An individual’s complex array of organ systems is responsible for keeping his body up and running. The systems must continuously function with efficiency in order to keep the body in its most optimum state. Whenever certain unavoidable malfunctions occur, the body scans and troubleshoots each system and once it locates the cause or the source of the problem, it induces chemical reactions or natural defense mechanisms to take care of the issue. This way, the human body can autonomously run itself, repair itself, and maintain itself until it slowly deteriorates over the course of time and reach the inevitable.

However, a huge number of both internal and external threats in different forms possess the capability to take an individual a ride forward across time, bringing him nearer to his end. Most of the time, these threats are too complex and foreign that the body has no certain defenses strong enough for them. When this happens, the body can only do so much to protect itself. Without external treatment and intervention, the body will eventually give in to the problem, causing a system failure that will lead to the worst-case scenario of every living creature in the planet -- death.

Take for example the case of a young man named Inat (not his real name). A resident of Iloilo City who became a victim of a crime so heinous and violating, can take a person’s self-respect and plunge him deep into the dark world of depression. However, Inat’s rapists did not only leave a traumatic experience in his mind but also a death sentence in the form of a virus coursing through his bloodstream -- HIV.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a virus that targets the body’s immune system, specifically the cells designed to fight infections, increasing a person’s vulnerability to life-threatening diseases. Over time, if left untreated, the virus will progress to AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), the stage wherein different sorts of complications start to break down his organ systems one by one.

Globally, 79.3 million people have been infected with HIV ever since the epidemic started in June 1981. Unfortunately, 45.76% of this figure (36.3 million) died an untimely death because of AIDS-related illnesses (UNAIDS, 2021).

Fortunately, the introduction of a combination drug treatment known by different names such as "AIDS cocktail” and antiretroviral therapy (ART) in 1995 (Healthline.com, 2019) helped reduce HIV infections by 52% from an average of 3.15 million people diagnosed in the late 1990s compared to a figure of around 1.5 million in 2020 (UNAIDS, 2021).

Moreover, still according to UNAIDS (2021), AIDS-related deaths were also reduced by 64% from their peak in 2004 (1.9 million deaths) compared to around 680 000 deaths in 2020.

As of 2020, Inat is among the 37.7 million people living with HIV. From this figure, 95.5% are adults, 5% are children aged 0 - 14 years old, and 53% of the population living with HIV are women and girls.

The introduction of ART was a revolutionary breakthrough in 1995. However, it is not a cure. ART just keeps the viral load of HIV in the blood to a low and undetectable level. More, unfortunately, this certain treatment, when not followed as prescribed, has the potential to create a stronger and drug resistant strain which can limit a patient’s options for a successful HIV treatment. This indicates that the world needs a treatment that is not prone to human error so that cases of drug resistance will be reduced to 0.

Luckily, Excision BioTherapeutics of the United States may have possibly created the elixir of life for HIV patients. Last September 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration granted the said company the approval to start testing their HIV treatment in volunteers with HIV.

Known as EBT-101, this treatment would come in the form of a single dose given intravenously over one to two hours. In this trial, participants will continue taking ART for three months after getting the dose, then go off the medication.

Excision BioTherapeutics CEO Daniel Dornbusch told Philadelphia magazine that, “The goal, of course, is to find the first therapeutic to create functional cures for HIV.” But, take note that the term “functional cure” is not synonymous with “cure”. Functionally curing a person means that even though a virus remains inside a person’s body, it will no longer be capable of inflicting harm. This means that if a person is functionally cured, the viral genome will remain in his body but they will be HIV negative and will not need to take antiretroviral treatments. The opposite of a functional cure is a sterilizing cure. This particular cure will remove every viral genome from an individual.

As much as we prefer sterilizing a cure, a functional cure is currently our best shot against HIV if Excision BioTherapeutics’ human trials prove that EBT-101 is successful. If the treatment is deemed successful, EBT-101 will be the greatest medical breakthrough in HIV ever since the introduction of ART.

Aside from Excision BioTherapeutics, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine also offered a path to a functional cure after supressing HIV infections in mice.

Steven Almo, Ph.D., the director of the Macromolecular Therapeutics Development Facility at the said college, developed synthetic proteins dubbed as synTac (“synapse for T-cell activation”) which are designed to selectively stimulate the immune system’s CD8+ “killer” T cells to multiply and specifically target HIV-infected T cells.

These medical breakthroughs, which are entirely unique in nature, offer different options in rendering HIV in humans useless. In a few years, if human trials deem successful, functional cures will eliminate the dangerous drug-resistant strains that will possibly be created by reckless usage of ART.

Functionally curing HIV is a huge step in solving one of the many problems humans are dealing with right now. This will totally save HIV patients and especially victims like Inat from a death sentence, unlike the currently existing ART that merely buys time for the people that use it. Functional cures will not buy time but destroy the very execution table that Inat and other HIV patients will eventually lie down into.