Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome or AIDS is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. The late stage of the condition leaves individuals prone to opportunistic infections and tumors. Although treatments for AIDS and HIV exist to slow the virus’s progression, but, there is no known cure. There is currently no vaccine or cure for HIV or AIDS. The only known method of prevention are based on avoiding exposure to the virus or failing that an antiretroviral treatment directly after a highly significant exposure, called post-exposure prophylaxis.

Well current treatment for HIV infection consists of highly active antiretroviral therapy, also known as HAART. HAART allows the stabilization of the patient’s symptoms and viremia, but it neither cures the patient of HIV, nor alleviates the symptoms, and high levels of HIV-1, often HAART resistant, return once treatment is stopped. Moreover, it would take more than the lifetime of an individual to be cleared of HIV infection using HAART. Despite this, many HIV-infected individuals have experienced remarkable improvements in their general health and quality of life, which has led to the plummeting of HIV-associated morbidity and mortality. In the absence of HAART, progression from HIV infection to AIDS occurs at a median of between nine to ten years and the median survival time after developing AIDS is only 9.2 months. HAART is thought to increase survival time by between 4 and 12 years. This average reflects the fact that for some patients and in many clinical cohorts this may be more than fifty percent of patients HAART achieves far less than optimal results. This is due to a variety of reasons such as medication intolerance/side effects, prior ineffective antiretroviral therapy and infection with a drug-resistant strain of HIV.

Vanderbilt University, Brigham Young University, and Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Report Novel Drug Compound Kills Multiple HIV Strains; Synthetic Small Molecule Acts Through Unique Strain-Independent Virucidal Mechanism Vanderbilt University, Brigham Young University and Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals, Inc. today announced that one of a family of compounds, called Ceragenins (or CSAs) shows potent virucidal activity in in vitro laboratory tests against multiple strains of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS.
CSAs were invented by Dr. Paul D. Savage of Brigham Young University’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and exclusively licensed to Ceragenix. In data previously presented by Dr. Savage and other researchers, CSAs have been shown to have broad spectrum antibacterial activity. Dr. Derya Unutmaz, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tested several CSAs in his laboratory for their ability to kill HIV directly.
“We found that CSA-54 potently inhibits HIV infection of primary human CD4+ T cells, the virus’s in vivo targets, and was not toxic to epithelial cells at concentrations significantly higher than those required to kill the virus,” stated Dr. Unutmaz. “In addition, CSA-54 killed a wide range of HIV isolates, and completely blocked genetically engineered HIV that enters the cells independent of the cell surface receptor the virus normally uses. This finding indicates that CSA-54 likely attacks the viral membrane and disrupts the virus from interacting with its target cells, similar to some of the known microbicidal peptides. This is particularly important as a compound that targets the viral membrane is likely to be effective against all strains of the virus, regardless of mutations as the viral membrane remains unchanged.”

“We are encouraged, based on these early in vitro studies, that CSAs may provide a completely unique family of anti-infectives, potentially active against a wide range of viral, fungal, and bacterial targets, including those resistant to current therapies,” stated Steven Porter, CEO of Ceragenix. “Given the potent activity of CSA-54 against all strains of HIV tested, we plan on exploring the use of this compound in both topical and systemic applications for HIV therapy.”