Washington: Oxford researchers announced Thursday the discovery of a highly virulent strain of HIV that has been lurking in the Netherlands for decades but is “no cause for alarm” due to the effectiveness of modern treatments.
Their findings, published in the journal “Science” on Thursday, revealed that patients infected with the “VB variant” had 3.5 to 5.5 times higher levels of the virus in their blood than those infected with other variants, as well as a more rapidly fading immune system.
The study also discovered that after starting treatment, people with the VB variant had similar immune system recovery and survival rates as people with other HIV variants.
“There’s no reason to be concerned about this new viral variant,” said Oxford epidemiologist Chris Wymant, the paper’s lead author, in an interview with AFP.
According to the researchers, the variant likely emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Netherlands, but began to decline around 2010.
Because modern interventions appear to still be effective against the variant, the research team believes that widespread HIV treatment in the Netherlands did not contribute to the virus’s evolution and that early detection and treatment are critical.
“Our findings highlight the importance of World Health Organization guidance that individuals at risk of contracting HIV have access to regular testing to allow for early diagnosis and treatment,” said co-author Christophe Fraser.
, another Oxford researcher, said in a press release announcing the results.
The findings also lend support to the theory that viruses can evolve to become more virulent, a widely held belief with few real-world examples.
Another recent example was the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus.
According to Wymant, the discovery of the HIV variant should “serve as a warning that we should never be overconfident in saying viruses will simply evolve to become milder.”
The team discovered 109 people infected with the VB variant, with only four of them living outside of the Netherlands but still in Western Europe.
– 500 different mutations –
Because the HIV virus is constantly evolving, each person infected has a slightly different version.
The VB variant, on the other hand, was discovered to have over 500 mutations.
“Finding a new variant is normal,” Wyman explained, “but finding a new variant with unusual properties — especially one with increased virulence — is not.”
The VB variant was first identified in 17 HIV positive individuals by parsing a large data set from the BEEHIVE project, a data collection and analysis initiative in Europe and Uganda.
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Because 15 of the 17 were from the Netherlands, they looked at data from 6,700 HIV-positive Dutch people and found 92 more.
The VB variant first appeared in their data in someone diagnosed in 1992 who had an early version of the variant, and the most recent in 2014.
Other researchers have since discovered more people with the variant who were diagnosed after 2014.
Doctors typically monitor the decline of CD4 T-cells, which are targeted by the HIV virus and critical for protecting the body against infections, to assess HIV’s immune system deterioration.
In patients infected with the VB variant, CD4 decline occurred twice as quickly as in other variants, “putting them at risk of developing AIDS much more quickly,” according to the researchers.
In addition to having a greater impact on the immune system, the team discovered that the VB variant is more easily transmitted.
They arrived at this conclusion after comparing the various versions of the VB variant extracted from infected patients.
The fact that they were so similar suggests that the virus was responsible.
– It is ‘critical’ to diagnose and treat cancer as soon as possible.
“Because the VB variant causes a faster decline in immune system strength, it is critical that individuals are diagnosed early and begin treatment as soon as possible,” according to the press release.
“This reduces the amount of time HIV can harm an individual’s immune system and endanger their health,” Fraser added.
Fraser is also the principal investigator of the BEEHIVE project, which began in 2014 to collect data on how HIV virus mutations can cause varying degrees of severity in patients.
Those differences were previously thought to be primarily due to the strength of individuals’ immune systems.
The researchers stated that they were unable to determine which genetic mutation in the VB variant caused its occurrence.
