One Of HIV's Pathways Discovered

It's a tricky little devil playing hide and seek within a body and now the researchers that work with the HIV virus have found out how the virus builds up its dormant reservoirs.

Scientists at the University of Rochester think there may be a straightforward way of attacking the macrophages that HIV uses as viral hideaways in the body. The discovery of which steps the virus takes to overtake the macrophage could lead to a new treatment with a medicine that is already being used for fighting parasites. The hope is that these drugs can be used to block the main step and cause the cell to self-destruct.

"It's a very smart virus," said lead researcher Dr. Baek Kim. "They have to have a very good fence to protect their house for a long time. ... Get rid of the fence, and now their house is gone."

Because of the advancements in treating the HIV virus in many parts of the world it is no longer a death sentence. While being able to change the killer virus into a chronic infection it is still uncurable because of two pools of dormant cells always ready to resurface. The memory T cells, which in many cases help build your immunity and protect you from viruses that have already attacked your body like measles. The other pool is the macrophages. The macrophage is another type of immune cell that soars through your blood looking for bacteria and other invaders of the body to attack. If a virus attacks them normally they self destruct. The HIV virus though is tricky and has no intention of dying off once it finds a host. The cell that should be fighting with all it has instead lives on long past a normal lifespan, remaining dormant.

"Up to now, nobody has really thought about how to eliminate the macrophage reservoir," said Dr. Kuan-Teh Jeang, an HIV specialist at the National Institutes of Health. "The imagination now has turned toward, 'How do we eliminate reservoirs?' ... The best way to address our problem is to simply kill those cells."

The researchers at Rochester found a protein that HIV produces allowing a particular cell survival pathway. After many steps it activates an enzyme called Akt. Akt is a 911 call for self destroying cells that prevents them from doing themselves in. It would be great for a suicide help desk but it's murder when you're talking about HIV. By not being able to do themselves in the virus lives on. This discovery could be the beginning of the end though for the virus. Drug tests are hoped to be started soon.

"The evidence they show is in fact pretty good," said NIH's Jeang, who says the next step should be a test of miltefosine in monkeys infected with SIV, the monkey version of the AIDS virus.