review · Medicine
Antiretroviral therapy remains the standard care for managing HIV, yet it presents ongoing challenges including adverse side effects, drug resistance, and access barriers. A review of academic databases identifies multiple emerging therapeutic strategies aimed at moving beyond standard management toward a cure. These interventions include stem cell transplantation, gene therapy, immunotherapy, latency reversal agents, and pharmaceutical vaccines. Gene therapy offers potential for engineering cellular resistance against infection and directly targeting infected cells, whilst immunotherapy aims to boost immune responses against the virus. Latency reversal agents can reactivate dormant viral reservoirs, exposing infected cells to immune clearance or antiretroviral drugs. Medical vaccines also show promise in strengthening antiviral immunity. Overcoming current technical and biological barriers across these diverse modalities remains essential to ending the pandemic.
Although current antiretroviral medications successfully suppress HIV, they do not cure the infection and require lifelong administration. Understanding alternative therapeutic strategies, such as gene editing, immune enhancement, and reservoir-targeting agents, is crucial for developing permanent curative interventions that eliminate viral reservoirs and reduce long-term treatment burdens for millions of affected individuals worldwide.
The reviewed approaches point toward biotechnology and pharmaceutical development opportunities in gene editing, immunotherapeutics, vaccine formulations, and viral reservoir disruptors. Intended beneficiaries are people living with HIV who require alternative or curative options. The abstract indicates that these modalities represent experimental and developing interventions facing significant remaining hurdles, placing them largely at an early-stage research and development phase rather than near market deployment.
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Antiretroviral therapy, also known as antiretroviral therapy (ART), has been at the forefront of the ongoing battle against human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDs). ART is effective, but it has drawbacks such as side effects, medication resistance, and difficulty getting access to treatment, which highlights the urgent need for novel treatment approaches. This review explores the complex field of HIV/AIDS treatment, covering both established alternative treatment modalities and orthodox antiretroviral therapy. Numerous reliable databases were reviewed, including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The results of a thorough literature search revealed numerous therapeutic options, including stem cell transplantation, immunotherapy, gene therapy, latency reversal agents, and pharmaceutical vaccinations. While gene therapy has promise for altering cellular resistance to infection and targeting HIV-positive cells, immunotherapy treatments seek to strengthen the immune system's ability to combat HIV. Latency reversal agents offer a promising method of breaking the viral latency and making infected cells vulnerable to immune system destruction or antiretroviral drugs. Furthermore, there is potential for improving immune responses against HIV using medical vaccinations. This review stresses the vital significance of ongoing research and innovation in the hunt for a successful HIV/AIDS treatment through a thorough examination of recent developments and lingering challenges. The assessment notes that even though there has been tremendous progress in treating the illness, there is still more work to be done in addressing current barriers and investigating various treatment options in order to achieve the ultimate objective of putting an end to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
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DOI: 10.1097/md.0000000000038768
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