Could this be the endgame for HIV? Pioneers of HIV research last week announced a united goal: to stamp out the virus forever.
鈥淔inding a cure is going to be one of multiple strategies to end the epidemic,鈥� says Sharon Lewin of the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, who is one of the 34 founders of the global scientific strategy called 鈥淭owards an HIV Cure鈥�. The announcement came ahead of the 19th in Washington DC this week.
HIV can be suppressed using antiretroviral drugs but not cured, because the drugs only kill cells in which the virus is multiplying. HIV can lay low by inserting dormant copies of itself into the DNA of healthy cells. Lewin and others are researching new approaches to flush out HIV. She is managing a trial exploring a promising avenue 鈥� giving people a cancer drug called vorinostat that 鈥渨akes up the virus鈥� so it can be destroyed with antiretroviral drugs.
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Other avenues include loading immune cells with genes to sabotage a white-blood-cell鈥檚 surface protein, CCR5, which HIV uses to enter cells. A treatment aimed at biochemically chipping the virus out of infected people鈥檚 DNA is also in development.
