Interesting New HIV/AIDS Potential Treatment Report

In the early 1980s, as a physician and volunteer professional chair of a local Red Cross Blood Services advisory committee, and later as the Chair of  Northern California Red Cross Blood Service's Board (and subsequently, for the Western United States), I had the chance to experience the impact of  HIV on patients, my community and on national blood transfusion programs. As a practicing clinical hematologist, I sat through many meetings about HIV and AIDS, most of which highlighted highly pessimistic views about preventive measures such as  education, pharmacologic measures and vaccines. As a healthcare attorney, and author of a chapter concerning HIV-infected health care workers in the Health Law Guide, I was able to sound a more optomistic note as effective treatments evolved, allowing HIV infected people to experience dramatically improved qualities of life and survivals. But no approach suggested cure.

In an AIDS RESEARCH AND THERAPY abstract from a recently published report from Israel, Aviad Levin and others, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, state:

"A correlation between increase in the integration of Human Immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) cDNA and cell death was previously established. Here we show that combination of peptides that stimulate integration together with the protease inhibitor Ro 31-8959 caused apoptotic cell death of HIV infected cells with total extermination of the virus. This combination did not have any effect on non-infected cells. Thus it appears that cell death is promoted only in the infected cells. It is our view that the results described in this work suggest a novel approach to specifically promote death of HIV-1 infected cells and thus may eventually be developed into a new and general anti-viral therapy."

The report does not promise cure, but does describe a serious advance in the potential for treatment of HIV infection. It is worth reading.