AIDS discoveries « From Eternity To Here

H I V

There are human beings who live with HIV- some for decades, without ever having had a symptom.

Not one. The Boston Globe:

For decades, they lived a mystery: Why were they able to survive with the AIDS virus, free of symptoms and the need for potent drugs, while so many others with the same germ turned deathly ill?

Their innate ability to keep HIV infections in check intrigued researchers, who suspected these people, known as “controllers,’’ might carry clues to designing effective vaccines after nearly 30 years of frustration.

Now, an international team of researchers, led by specialists in Boston, has cracked these HIV survivors’ genetic code, sifting through almost 1.4 million pieces of DNA to discover five amino acids that separate the small cadre of controllers from the vast majority who must take medication or face death.

This is the kind of research that could actually go somewhere. The full article here.

There have a been a lot of breaking HIV stories this past week, here are a couple more.

The first is another breakthrough: scientists discover a protein that destroys HIV.

The second was a little tough for me to take, but discovery can only lead to a furthering of understanding, right?

Apparently HIV can hide in the brain, relatively unaffected by medical treatment. This just brings to light the necessity of understanding that just because viral levels are low in the bloodstream, which is where viral loads are measured, they aren’t necessarily low everywhere else in the body. And we know that HIV is a destructive virus- it hurts the places in which it lives. This may push research into medication/treatment that addresses the blood/brain barrier.

In the meantime, will we see measuring spinal fluid viral loads as routine in our future?