Drug helps purge hidden HIV virus

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have successfully brought latent HIV infection out of hiding, with a drug used to treat certain types of lymphoma. Tackling latent HIV in the immune system is critical to finding a cure for AIDS. While current antiretroviral therapies can very effectively control virus levels, they can never fully eliminate the virus from the cells and tissues it has infected. The new study is the first to demonstrate that the biological mechanism that keeps the HIV virus hidden and unreachable by current antiviral therapies can be targeted and interrupted in humans, providing new hope for a strategy to eradicate HIV completely. According to Dr. David Margolis who led the study, this is the first step towards curing HIV infection. It shows that this class of drugs, HDAC inhibitors, can attack persistent virus.