[afro-nets] HIV Curable: light at the end of the tunnel?

[Claudio Schuftan <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

HIV Curable: light at the end of the tunnel?
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New HIV Treatment Strategy Shows Promise
By EMMA ROSS,
AP Medical Writer
Fri August 12,10:17 AM ET

LONDON - A new treatment strategy has shown promise in helping
to transform HIV into a curable infection. Preliminary research
published this week in The Lancet medical journal outlines how
scientists used an anti-convulsant drug to awaken dormant HIV
hiding in the body, where it is temporarily invisible but still
dangerous.

HIV infection is incurable because current drugs only work when
the virus is multiplying, which occurs only when it is in an ac-
tive cell. However, HIV sometimes infects dormant cells, and
when it does, it becomes dormant itself.

While the virus poses no threat in its resting state, the sleep-
ing cells sporadically wake up, reactivating the virus and caus-
ing it to multiply. Patients must continue to take medications
for the rest of their lives so they can fight the virus when it
comes out of the reawakened cells. Only if every last infected
dormant cell is wiped out - or the virus purged from these cells
- can patients stop taking medication and be virus-free, experts
say.

Figuring out how to clear this reservoir of latent infection, or
whether that's even possible, is one of the hottest areas of
AIDS research.

Over the last few years, a handful of drugs have been shown to
decrease the size of the dormant HIV pool, but they were subse-
quently abandoned because their effect was either too weak or
the side effects too toxic.

The latest drug, valproic acid, shows more promise.