HIV and cancer teams double up to seek out new disease killers

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HIV experts at an international conference starting on Saturday are keenly courting colleagues in oncology to explore whether advances in harnessing the immune system against cancer can help the search for a cure for AIDS.

The two diseases, while very different in many ways, have some key crossover points when it comes to developing new treatments, specialists say -- most notably the immune system, its crucial T-cells, and its ability to fight-off invaders.

"The parallels between HIV persistence and cancer are striking," said Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, former president of the International AIDS Society (IAS), which is hosting a week-long conference in Paris. "In both cases, the immune response is unable to target and clear HIV-infected cells and tumor cells."

Reinforcement to human immune systems maybe key to solving both HIV/AIDS and cancer. /VCG Photo‍

Scientists working on both diseases also face similar challenges in tracking the size, number and spread of infected cells, she said, which can hide out in reservoirs in hard-to-reach tissues.

HIV experts see this as one of the key links to cancer medicine, which in recent years has seen the development of a new generation of drugs that target and re-arm the immune system, rather than just poisoning tumor cells.

Among the drugs in this new class are medicines known as PDL-1 or PD1 inhibitors that engage and revitalize the patient's own immune system to attack the cancer.

Three kinds of immune drugs are now already available in America and one is legal in Taiwan, where this drug called ipilimumab lifts the 1-year survival rate of terminal melanocytoma patients from 6% to over 51%.

(Source: Reuters)