ITB Lecturer Conduct a Research on HIV Medicine

July 25, 2018 - ( update : 30-07-2018 )

By Fivien Nur Savitri, ST, MT

Editor Fivien Nur Savitri, ST, MT

BANDUNG, itb.ac.id – HIV is a virus that attacks human immune system and causes AIDS. Currently, there is yet a cure to the disease. HIV treatment does slow down the progress of the disease, but it will not eliminate HIV infection within patient’s body. Therefore, prevention toward the spread of HIV has to be enhanced. Early diagnosis and appropriate therapy are solutions to the disease.

Until today, there are several regimens of medicine used for HIV therapy. For the first regimens, the medicines are subsidized by World Health Organization (WHO), so that patients can get medical access more easily. The compliance of the patient is an important key to determine the treatment’s level of success. If HIV patient failed on the first line regimens, the patient will be given the second line regimens. Unfortunately, the second line regimens are not subsidized by WHO, hence it is not accessible to every patient because of its relatively expensive cost.

Departing from that problem, Dr. Azzania Fibriani, a lecturer from School of Life Sciences and Technology (SITH) of Institut Teknologi Bandung conduct a research on Development of High Throughput System to Select the Candidate of the New Medicine for Anti HIV from Indonesia’s bio-resources. “The idea of our research is how to discover anti HIV medicine with Indonesia’s own research,” she said at Labtek SITH-ITB, ITB Ganesa Campus, Bandung, on Monday (16/7/2018).

The research about medicine selection system has been conducted since 2017, in which Dr. Azzania and her team design a system to select medicine from Indonesia’s biodiversity. Currently, the research is in development and validation phases.

This selection system has an advantage. Besides its ability to select various compounds simultaneously in a short time, this system does not need to be conducted in high security level laboratory (Biosafety level 3). Therefore, screening system can be conducted in almost every molecular laboratory in Indonesia. This will be very beneficial to select new medicine for anti HIV.

“Using this system, people do not need to develop the virus. This system enable selection of medicine compounds for candidate of HIV medicine. This system is being designed up until now and is currently on validation phase. In 1-2 years, this system can be developed to the next stage. This system is usable to search for alternative treatment to HIV infection,” she said.

With this research, Dr. Azzania received L’Oreal Fellowship For Women in Science award in 2016, in the field of innovation in HIV medicine. She hopes that after the validation is done at the end of 2018, testing for selection of compound candidate can be carried out immediately. “It is ready for validation. This October, all compounds from Indonesia are ready to test. We obtain the compound from natural ingredients,” she concluded.