Five people in my circle of family, friends and acquaintances have HIV or AIDS. While drug cocktails do help, this may be the breakthrough they’ve been waiting for: Doctors may have found a way to destroy HIV.
“We have found an innovative way to kill the virus by finding this small region of HIV that is unchangeable,” Dr. Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston said.
Dr. Paul and Dr. Miguel Escobar aren’t talking about just suppressing HIV – they’re talking about destroying it permanently by arming the immune system with a new weapon lab tests have shown to be effective.
… “The virus needs at least one constant region, and that is the essence of calling it the Achilles heel,” Paul said.
That Achilles heel is the doctors’ way in. They take advantage of it with something called an abzyme.
It’s naturally produced by people, like lupus patients. When they applied that abzyme to the HIV virus, it permanently disarmed it.
“What we already have in our hand are the abzymes that we could be infusing into the human subjects with HIV infection, essentially to move the virus,” Paul said.
Basically, their idea could be used to control the disease for people who already have it and prevent infection for those at risk.
I’m almost afraid to hope, but then, decades ago cancer was pretty much terminal. Only twenty years ago my husband’s doctors told his parents (we were not yet married) that they did not expect him to survive his cancer. The innovations and research at MD Anderson saved his life. America’s medical research and development is second to none.
We still need to focus on prevention, and we need to lose the politically correct restrictions on it that cost lives. But I’ll be very excited to learn how this breakthrough pans out in clinical trials.
h/t Ace
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