A new study traced the evolution of HIV in the United States, they found that the virus is slowly adapting to humans.
"Much research has focused on how HIV adapts to antiviral drugs-we wanted to investigate how HIV adapts to us, its human hosts, over time,"lead author Zabrina Brumme, an assistant professor in Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Health Sciences said in an ews release.
"HIV adapts to the immune response in reproducible ways. In theory, this could be bad news for host immunity-and vaccines-if such mutations were to spread in the population," Brumme said. "Just like transmitted drug resistance can compromise treatment success, transmitted immune escape mutations could erode our ability to naturally fight HIV."
The team looked at HIV sequences from patients as far back as 1979, when the epidemic first began. The researchers characterized the virus' ancestral DNA and looked at how "immune escape mutations" spread through society.
"Overall, our results show that the virus is adapting very slowly in North America," Brumme said. "In parts of the world harder hit by HIV though, rates of adaptation could be higher."
To make their findings the researchers were charged with the difficult task of extracting viral RNA and culturing them in a laboratory setting.
"It was painstaking work," health sciences student Laura Cotton said in the news release. "But it was fascinating to study these isolates in the lab, knowing that they had played an important role in the history of HIV on our continent."
The team has hope for the future of HIV treatment. The researchers hope their work will help get society a step closer to an preventative vaccine or an effective treatment.
"We already have the tools to curb HIV in the form of treatment-and we continue to advance towards a vaccine and a cure. Together, we can stop HIV/AIDS before the virus subverts host immunity through population-level adaptation."
