"HIV 'safe houses' identified inside the body"

[tryingtostay]

The tools already exist for finding these 'safe houses'  Borrowed from Cancer research these tools will help identify and wipe out latent reservoirs.

I clipped out some of the repetitive talk about HIV and copied the more interesting stuff in the article.  The article can be found here.

"... HIV needs to be "housed" in a cell, a safe haven, so to speak, to live and replicate. It usually lives in CD4+ T lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell whose role is to activate the body's defence against infections. But finding an HIV pool is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Within the large population of CD4+ T lymphocytes, there is only one cell pool in a million cells.

Chomont's team has demonstrated that cells that harbour the virus have common immunological characteristics. Rémi Fromentin, a research associate at the CRCHUM, has identified three cell markers that typify these pools. The proteins, called PD-1, LAG-3, and TIGIT, are expressed at the surface of cells that harbour the persistent virus. "Using the house analogy, PD-1, LAG-3, and TIGIT are the chimney, door, and fence, for example. The goal is to destroy all the houses that have these characteristics, in order to eliminate the virus," said Chomont.

"This discovery is important because, until now, no combination of markers has had the potential for therapeutic treatment against HIV pools. The advantage is that anticancer drugs that specifically target these markers already exist. We believe we could use the same drugs to destroy HIV reservoirs," said Fromentin.

The researchers will test antibodies in the laboratory that specifically bind to these markers. Since some of the drugs, known as immunomodulators, are already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada, their use could be transferred relatively quickly to clinical practice. Along with this promising application, Chomont and Fromentin continue their work in refining their knowledge about these "safe houses" for HIV pools. The goal is to aim as accurately as possible by destroying the "right houses" and therefore all the cells that harbour HIV despite ART."

[SFlSurvive]

That is great news! Good to see the world is working together to end this once and for all! Thanks for the update! Made ny day.

[jsick]

It is my idea or we are in the midst of a wave of promising news about a cure for AIDS?

It is as if arranged.

[leatherman]

It is my idea or we are in the midst of a wave of promising news about a cure for AIDS?

It is as if arranged.

it's not "arranged". There has been 35+ years of HIV research leading up to today. A lot of people have worked very hard to get the science of HIV to the point it's at today. And those people still have a long way to go before anything like a vaccine or a cure is available to the market.

Unfortunately, a "cure" is still a long way away. We're much more likely to see better methods to sustain long term viral suppression/remission in the future rather than a "cure".

http://forums.poz.com/index.php?topic=63579.0

DURBAN, South Africa -- History suggests that finding a "classic" cure for HIV -- clearing the virus from the body -- is going to be a tough chore, a top U.S. official said here.

On the other hand, a less aspirational goal -- that of achieving sustained remissions from the virus -- looks closer to hand in the current state of medical science, according to Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
...
A classic cure is "certainly not impossible, but very challenging because of the very special nature of HIV," Fauci said before giving a keynote address at a pre-conference symposium dedicated to the science of curing HIV.
...
Attaining a sustained viral remission, which would allow anti-HIV medications to be stopped for long periods of time without fear of viral rebound, is "likely more feasible," Fauci said.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/iac/59136