Manufacturer of medical devices, diagnostics and generic drugs Abbott ABT,
said on Tuesday that a team of scientists has found an unusually high number of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with controlled HIV and said they could be key to advancing therapies or even developing a vaccine. The people in question test positive for HIV antibodies, but have a low or undetectable viral load count, without using antiretroviral treatment, Abbott said in a statement. The findings were published in EbioMedicine, which is part of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. They “may help researchers discover biological trends within this population that could lead to advances in HIV treatments and potentially vaccines,” the statement said. Researchers at Abbott, working with Johns Hopkins University, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Protestant University in the Congo found that the prevalence of elite drivers of HIV ranged from 2.7% to 4.3% in the DRC, compared with 0.1% to 2.0% worldwide. “The finding of a large group of elite HIV controllers in the DRC is significant considering that HIV is a lifelong chronic disease that usually progresses over time,” said Tom Quinn, MD , director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, and head of the international HIV / AIDS research section of NIAID. “There have been rare cases where the infection did not progress in people before this study, but this high frequency is unusual and suggests that there is something physiologically interesting in the DRC that is not random.” Abbott shares were a slightly higher premarket, but have gained 50% in the last twelve months, while the S&P 500 SPX,
has gained 26%.