New Approach To Curing HIV/AIDS Uncovered

Writer: Marcia Woods on Sep 1 2010.

Scientists have uncovered why current approach to curing HIV/Aids is not working as well as they would hope.

The present system of HIV therapy does not remove the causative cells but it only blocks their multiplication and postpones inevitable onslaught of AIDS.

A new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal, AIDS Research & Therapy illustrates a novel method in removing HIV in an individual by seeking out only HIV diseased cells.

HIV multiplies throughout the person’s body after DNA virus is attached into the genome of host cells.

Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) only inhibits the ability of the HIV to multiply at several stages of infection but does removes the sick cells.

Professors Abraham Loyter, Assaf Friedler and their associates at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, concentrated on the purging of contaminated cells.

Loyter believes that while HIV fuses its DNA into the human genome, it only incorporates enough DNA to multiply but it stays away from the person’s genome instability causing predetermined death of the contaminated cells (apoptosis).

Dr. Loyter and his colleagues are looking for a way to bring about apoptosis by stimulating more integration of HIV DNA into human genome.

In doing so, they came up with peptides (called ?mix?) that can get inside the contaminated cells and activate integrase virus into action.

Intigrase activation brought about a rising amount of molecular DNA virus incorporated into the contaminated cells that bring the contaminated cells in to “panic mode” leading to destruction.

Dr Loyter said: “Whilst this research is promising, a major caveat with these studies is that they are preliminary. So far these experiments have only been shown to ‘cure’ HIV from small dishes of cultured cells in the authors’ laboratory, but the findings are an exciting development in the quest to eradicate this devastating global pandemic.”

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