New engineering peptides may show potential long-term anti HIV potential

Recently, in a research report published in the international journal PLoS patterns, scientists from Fudan University and other institutions found that a new engineering peptide ibp-cp24 may be a long-acting anti HIV drug, which can be used alone or with a wide range of neutralizing antibodies to treat and prevent HIV-1 infection Photo source: Bi W, et al (2019) In this study, the researchers pointed out that ibp-cp24 can show a long half-life and can potentially carry anti HIV-1 activities widely, even for drug-resistant strains Enflucetin is the first anti HIV peptide drug approved by FDA However, due to its short half-life and easy to produce drug-resistant HIV strains, the clinical application of enflucetin is often limited In this study, the researchers developed a new strategy, which can extend the half-life of the peptide by fusing the anti HIV short peptide named Cp24 onto the human immunoglobulin G (IgG) Fc binding peptide (IBP) Ibp-cp24 can inhibit broad-spectrum HIV-1 strains, including those resistant to enfluviride; more importantly, its half-life in macaque blood can reach 46.1 hours, which is nearly 26 and 14 times of that of Cp24 and enfluviride; intravenous injection of ibp-cp24 in macaque does not induce significant specific antibody response to ibp-cp24, and does not show significant toxic effect The mice that received ibp-cp24 in advance were also immune from HIV-1 infection, while the mice that received ibp-cp24 and normal human IgG at the same time could significantly reduce the virus content in their blood What's more, the combination of ibp-cp24 and broad-spectrum HIV neutralizing antibody can show a synergistic anti-HIV-1 effect, which shows that this strategy can help reduce the dosage of antibody and peptide, and also reduce the cost of treatment.