Could HIV drugs help keep Alzheimer’s at bay?

Medical News Today Article By Corrie Pelc on April 19, 2024 — Fact checked by Jill Seladi-Schulman, Ph.D

Researchers from Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, CA, have recently conducted a study which suggests that medications commonly used to treat HIV may also offer potential treatment opportunities for Alzheimer’s disease.

Their study paper appears in the journal Pharmaceuticals.

“Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia in the United States and worldwide, affecting [approximately] 7 million people in the U.S. alone,” Jerold Chun, MD, PhD, professor in the Degenerative Diseases Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, CA, and lead author of the study, told Medical News Today.

“In addition to those afflicted, families, society, and our economy are severely impacted by Alzheimer’s disease,” Chun added.

According to him, “[currently] approved therapies [for Alzheimer’s] have marginal benefit — [they] are not cures nor truly disease-modifying — and can also negatively affect patient health.“

“New treatment options that work better with less health risk are needed,” said Chun.

 

What is reverse transcriptase, and what does it do?

 

Chun explained that his and his team’s study is based on previous research published in 2018 that identified a reverse transcriptase-dependent phenomenon called “somatic gene recombination” which affected genes capable of promoting Alzheimer’s disease.

“Reverse transcriptase is a famous protein — a protein that can do things is called an ‘enzyme’ and reverse transcriptase is an enzyme — that can copy RNA— the stuff that encodes proteins in our cells — back into DNA, a ‘reverse’ process from the usual ‘Central Dogma’ of DNA-to-RNA-to-protein.”

– Jerold Chun, MD, PhD

“The reverse transcriptase was and is thought to be part of our brain — i.e., endogenous vs. from an exogenous viral infection,” he continued. “This [previous] discovery raised the possibility that blocking reverse transcriptase might be helpful in treating Alzheimer’s disease.”

Chun said that reverse transcriptase was first discovered in RNA viruses in 1970.

“It turns out that our brain — and body — have their own reverse transcriptases, which may go awry to promote Alzheimer’s disease and likely other brain disorders,” he detailed.

“HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — itself is an RNA virus that has its own reverse transcriptase. Medical science and the pharmaceutical industry have discovered many drugs called reverse transcriptase inhibitors that interrupt HIV’s life cycle, which has saved many AIDS patients,“ Chun said.

“Some of these same drugs could also work on the brain’s reverse transcriptases, which we examined observationally in the current study in those aged survivors who had received reverse transcriptase inhibitors,” he added.

 

HIV drugs tied to significant reduction in Alzheimer’s occurrence

 

For this study, Chun and his team analyzed medical records from more than 225,000 people, with about 80,000 having HIV and over the age of 60. More than 46,000 study participants had taken reverse transcriptase inhibitors.

Upon analysis, the researchers found that study participants who had exposure to reverse transcriptase inhibitors had a statistically significant reduced occurrence and frequency of Alzheimer’s disease.

“These results were expected,” Chun said. “In our 2018 report, we searched for cases of HIV-positive persons with Alzheimer’s disease and really could not find robust evidence of them, despite an expectation a decade earlier by some in the HIV field, of an avalanche of Alzheimer’s disease patients coming from this group.”

“Instead, [the] first apparent case was only seen in 2016,” he continued. “We, therefore, pursued an in-depth look by assessing tens of thousands of medical records of appropriate patients and controls, resulting in the current report that identified beneficial effects of reverse transcriptase inhibitor exposure in reducing Alzheimer’s disease.”

 

Read full article here.