A Way to Cure HIV Infection?

Modern HIV treatment drugs suppress an active HIV infection well enough that an HIV-infected person can live a relatively normal life. But they don’t cure an HIV infection because some viruses lie dormant inside living cells, out of reach of suppressive drug therapy. For that reason, high-cost suppressive therapy needs to be continued throughout the life of the patient, just so the drug is present whenever viruses do come out of hiding. What is needed is a way to get rid of the latent viruses lying dormant inside cells, once and for all.

A new approach is anti-latent therapy – therapy designed to prevent dormant viruses from staying dormant and hidden. The idea is to force any remaining dormant viruses to become active again so that they can be targeted and killed by suppressive therapy. A combination of anti-latent therapy and suppressive therapy just might wipe out an HIV infection completely. At least, that’s the idea.