HIV Scientists Make a Major Discovery Towards Treatment and Cure
In a move that has stunned HIV experts, German scientists reported yesterday that they had engineered an enzyme that attacked the DNA of the HIV virus, and cut it out of the infected cell.
Until now, HIV research had focused on improving ways to stop infection spreading, thereby postponing the onset of AIDS, when opportunistic infections overwhelm the body’s damaged immune system.
Other areas of research, more hypothetically, are seeking a vaccine to prevent infections taking hold in the first place. Rooting out established infections had been thought of as next to impossible.
Cutting HIV out of infected cells had been dismissed as a distant dream because the virus is so good at hiding itself. As a retrovirus, HIV splices itself into the host cell’s DNA — meaning it is inextricably linked to the person it has infected.
The infected cell can remain in a latent state, when it is all but undetectable by the body’s defence mechanisms, or it can become active. When activated, the infected cell turns into a factory for making more viral copies, killing the cell in the process. The new copies go out to infect other cells.
What makes HIV so pernicious is that it targets the immune cells that co-ordinate the body’s fight against invaders.
While existing anti-retroviral drugs are effective at stopping the virus from replicating, they cannot root out the viral DNA, meaning that replication takes off again if patients try coming off the medications.
In the German experiments, the enzyme recognised sections of infected cell DNA as belonging to HIV, and cut it out. The enzyme, Tre recombinase, eliminated the virus from the infected cells in about three months.
