An HIV patient lies on a hospital bed in Jakarta
© AFP/File Ahmad ZamroniJuly 31, 2008 (Sawf News) - Two doctors in Houston, Texas, announced a novel technique to attack in the June 2008 issue of the journal Autoimmunity Reviews.
The good doctors, Sudhir Paul, Ph.D, and Yasuhiro Nishiyama, Ph.D, are not talking about just suppressing HIV, as currently available drug cocktails do, but destroying it permanently by arming the immune system with a new weapon that lab tests and animal trials show works.
Current HIV drugs cannot destroy the virus because of its ability to mutate and adapt to drugs by changing its coating. Eventually the virus prevails and the infected person succumbs to the infection.
The Houston doctors have discovered the Achilles heel of the HIV virus - a small region where the virus cannot change its coating because it is the attachment point to T lymphocytes, the key cell in cell-mediated immunity. If that region is targeted the virus can be destroyed.
"We have found an innovative way to kill the virus by finding a small region of HIV that is unchangeable," says Even if everything goes well it will be at least five years before the research could help people with HIV.
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