ABSTRACT
Advances in biotechnology have led to improving human health with number of novel approaches to mitigate life-threatening diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. In the case of HIV, the damage caused by the retrovirus to the immune system leads to opportunistic infection as well as an elevated risk of autoimmune disease and cancer. Furthermore, clinical symptoms associated with the virus itself may arise. Antiretroviral drug therapy using reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, fusion inhibitor, chemokine receptor 5 antagonist and integrase strand transfer inhibitors have shown promising results in treating HIV infection and available in market in the form of various dosage forms. However, they are unable to completely cure the disease because of complexity in pathogenesis of HIV. In addition, these drugs have some limitations of poor solubility, permeability or, poor receptor binding capacity. To overcome these drawbacks, many novel drug delivery systems for the drugs belonging to above mentioned categories have been developed. The possibility of treating HIV infection using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing has been found in 2015. This provided a new area of research to the scientists who are working towards alternative treatment strategies for HIV infections. The present article describes about various treatment strategies used to treat HIV infections with special emphasis on the role of CRISPR/Cas9 gene-based technology. The potential benefits of specific epigenetic modification in the c-c chemokine receptor 5 gene (CCR5) via various delivery methods are also highlighted.
Subject(s)
HIV Infections , CRISPR-Cas Systems/genetics , Gene Editing/methods , Genetic Therapy/methods , HIV Infections/drug therapy , HIV Infections/genetics , Humans , Receptors, Chemokine/geneticsABSTRACT
Chequerboard and time-kill methods were used to compare the in vitro efficacies of the combinations gatifloxacin (GAT) with cefoperazone (CFP) and GAT with cefoperazone-sulbactam (CFP-SUL) against 58 clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The combinations GAT+CFP and GAT+CFP-SUL were shown to be synergistic for 36.2 and 58.6 % of isolates tested, respectively, using the chequerboard method. Time-kill studies with 11 strains showed synergy in 54.5 % for the GAT+CFP combination and 72.7 % for the GAT+CFP-SUL combination. The agreement between these two methods was found to be 72-81 %. There was a significant difference in synergy between the two combinations tested (P=0.011).