Manufacturer of medical devices, diagnostics and generic drugs Abbott ABT,
said Tuesday that a team of scientists had found an unusually high number of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with HIV controlled and said they could be the key to advancing therapies, or even to developing a vaccine. The people in question test positive for HIV antibodies, but have low or undetectable viral load counts, without using antiretroviral treatment, Abbott said in a statement. The results were published in EbioMedicine, part of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. They “can help researchers discover biological trends within this population that could lead to advances in HIV treatments – and potentially vaccines,” said the statement. Abbott researchers, working with Johns Hopkins University, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Université Protestante au Congo found that the prevalence of elite HIV controllers was 2.7% to 4.3% in the DRC, compared to 0.1% to 2.0% worldwide. “The discovery of a large group of elite HIV controllers in the DRC is significant, considering that HIV is a chronic lifelong condition that normally progresses over time,” said Tom Quinn, MD, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, and head of NIAID’s International HIV / AIDS Research Section. “There have been rare cases of infection not progressing in individuals prior to this study, but this high frequency is unusual and suggests that there is something interesting going on at a physiological level in the DRC that is not random.” Abbott’s shares were slightly higher in the pre-market, but have gained 50% in the past 12 months, while the S&P 500 SPX,
gained 26%.
