Immune booster helps HIV patients, study says
By Reuters, 10/25/00
WASHINGTON -- Adding an immune booster to standard HIV therapy seems to help patients handle the AIDS virus better than the drugs alone, US researchers said Wednesday.
The immune booster, interleukin-2 (IL-2), increased the number of CD4 T-cells, the immune system helper cells attacked by HIV, the researchers said.
"We believe our findings point to a new strategy for helping people with very low T-cell counts fight advanced HIV disease," Dr. Ronald Mitsuyasu, director of the University of California Los Angeles AIDS Research and Education Center, said in a statement.
Speaking to the 5th International Congress on Drug Therapy in HIV Infection in Glasgow, Scotland, Mitsuyasu said his team added IL-2 to the drug cocktails of 164 patients. Most patients got the IL-2 boost, while 55 got the drug cocktail, known also as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), alone.
The patients who received the combination therapy had a dramatic increase in new CD4 cells. This is usually linked with better health in HIV patients.
The patients also had fewer episodes of AIDS-related illnesses, such as Kaposi's sarcoma, lymphoma and pneumonia, the researchers said.
"We found it remarkable that we could observe a measurable difference in opportunistic infections after only 60 weeks," Mitsuyasu said.
Other researchers have also found that adding IL-2 to drug cocktails helps the patients' immune systems.
The National Institutes of Health has licensed the technology to Chiron Corp. of California.
Chiron says it plans an international Phase III trial for the IL-2 treatment, the last stage of patient testing before a company seeks US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for a drug.
One drawback is that IL-2 must be given in an injection, but patients can do this at home.
