Anti-HIV drugs kill the immune system

Anti-retroviral drugs are toxic in a number of ways, see The Case against HIV, section 5.3.

The specific reported toxicities include the killing of T-cells (section 5.3.3.14), which is supposed to be what “HIV” does. A new addition to this section is the report that integrase inhibitors also contribute to loss of T-cells:

R. Prasad, “IISc: HIV drug elvitegravir lowers the efficiency of immune system”, Hindu Times, 16 December

The research article is Nishana et al., “HIV integrase inhibitor, Elvitegravir, impairs RAG functions and inhibits V(D)J recombination”, Cell Death & Disease, 8 (2017) :e2852. doi: 10.1038/cddis.2017.237; it is open access.

Abstract (PMID: 28569776)
Integrase inhibitors are a class of antiretroviral drugs used for the treatment of AIDS that target HIV integrase, an enzyme responsible for integration of viral cDNA into host genome. RAG1, a critical enzyme involved in V(D)J recombination exhibits structural similarity to HIV integrase. We find that two integrase inhibitors, Raltegravir and Elvitegravir, interfered with the physiological functions of RAGs such as binding, cleavage and hairpin formation at the recombination signal sequence (RSS), though the effect of Raltegravir was limited. Circular dichroism studies demonstrated a distinct change in the secondary structure of RAG1 central domain (RAG1 shares DDE motif amino acids with integrases), and when incubated with Elvitegravir, an equilibrium dissociation constant (Kd) of 32.53±2.9 μM was determined by Biolayer interferometry, leading to inhibition of its binding to DNA. Besides, using extrachromosomal assays, we show that Elvitegravir inhibited both coding and signal joint formation in pre-B cells. Importantly, treatment with Elvitegravir resulted in significant reduction of mature B lymphocytes in 70% of mice studied. Thus, our study suggests a potential risk associated with the use of Elvitegravir as an antiretroviral drug, considering the evolutionary and structural similarities between HIV integrase and RAGs.

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This is just one illustration of the much-neglected fact that prescription drugs, so often advertised as “specific” to treatment of a disease, may do all sorts of other things as well. Chemicals, molecules, simply do what corresponds to their chemical structure, they don’t discriminate according to what we would like them to do. There are no “side” effects, there are just effects, even though the pharmaceutical industry tries to obfuscate that. Millions of people are being fed statins, for example, to lower their blood-cholesterol levels without being told that statins also interfere with coenzyme Q10 which the body makes and uses in all energy-related reactions; which is why a “side” effect of statins is muscle weakness.