Treating Hidden HIV Infection
- From: pluto <pluto@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:51:40 +0800
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=1030357
ABC News
New Strategy Shows Promise in Treating HIVNew Strategy Shows Promise in
Treating Hidden HIV Infection
By EMMA ROSS
The Associated Press
LONDON Aug 11, 2005 ? 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 active 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 sleeping cells
sporadically wake up, reactivating the virus and causing 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.
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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 subsequently abandoned because
their effect was either too weak or the side effects too toxic.
The latest drug, valproic acid, shows more promise, said Dr. Warner Greene,
director of the Gladstone Institute for Virology and Immunology at the
University of California, San Francisco.
"It's a first baby step, showing that maybe the use of (this type of drug)
far more likely in combination with one or two other agents might be a
viable approach for tackling this latency problem," said Greene, who was
not involved with the research but is conducting similar studies.
"The idea, if we could ever do it, is to purge every latently infected
cell. Treat patients for probably two or three years, they'd be able to
come off their antiretroviral therapy and they'd be virus-free," he said.
===========================================
cheers
pluto
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