Medical device, diagnostic and generic drug manufacturer Abbott ABT,
said on Tuesday that a team of scientists found an unusually large number of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with controlled HIV and said it could be a key to advancing therapies or even developing a vaccine. The people are positive for HIV antibodies, but have a low to undetectable number of viral pregnancies without using antiretroviral treatment, Abbott said in a statement. The findings were published in EbioMedicine, part of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. They “can help researchers discover biological trends in this population that could lead to advances in HIV treatments – and potentially vaccines,” the statement said. Researchers at Abbott University, Johns Hopkins University, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Protestant University of Congo found that the prevalence of elite HIV controllers was 2.7% to 4.3 % in the DRC, compared to 0.1% to 2.0% worldwide. “Finding a large group of elite HIV controllers in the DRC is significant, given that HIV is a chronic, lifelong condition that usually progresses over time,” said Tom Quinn, MD, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health and head of NIAID’s International HIV / AIDS Research Section. There have been rare cases of infection that do not progress in individuals before this study, but this high frequency is unusual and suggests that something interesting is happening at a physiological level in the DRC that is not random. Abbott shares were slightly higher premarket, but gained 50% in the last 12 months, while the S&P 500 SPX,
gained 26%.