Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) have developed artificial enzymes that can successfully block reactivation and replication of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in the host’s immune cells.
Made from vanadium pentoxide nanosheets, these nanozymes work by mimicking a natural enzyme called glutathione peroxidase that helps reduce oxidative stress levels in the host’s cells, which is required to keep the virus in check, a release from the institute explained.
The study, published in EMBO Molecular Medicine, was led by Amit Singh, Associate Professor and Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Senior Fellow at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology and Centre for Infectious Diseases Research (CIDR), and Govindasamy Mugesh, Professor at the Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry.
The release said there is currently no way to eliminate HIV from a patient’s body completely, and anti-HIV drugs are only successful in suppressing the virus, but fail at eradicating HIV from infected cells.
“The virus hides inside the host’s immune cells in a latent state and stably maintains its reservoir. When the levels of toxic molecules, such as hydrogen peroxide, increase in the host’s cells, leading to a state of increased oxidative stress, the virus gets reactivated and it emerges from hiding and begins replicating again,” it explained.
The researchers prepared ultrathin nanosheets of vanadium pentoxide in the lab and treated HIV-infected cells with them.
The sheets were found to reduce hydrogen peroxide just as effectively as the natural enzyme and prevent the virus from reactivating. “We found that these nanosheets were having some sort of direct effect where the expression of the host genes essential for virus reactivation is reduced,” explained Shalini Singh, first author and Research Associate at CIDR.
When the team treated immune cells from HIV-infected patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy (ART) with the nanozymes, latency was induced faster and subsequent reactivation was suppressed when therapy was stopped, indicating that combining the two was more effective, she added.
Elaborating further on the other advantages of combining ART with the nanozymes, Prof. Singh said nanozyme can help in reducing the side effects caused by ART drugs.
Although the nanozymes were found to be harmless to normal cells in lab tests, Prof. Mugesh points out that further studies are needed to understand if they can have other effects once they are introduced inside the body.
