The same technology that made Covid vaccinations possible might help researchers find a way to cure HIV. Australian researchers reported that they have successfully used mRNA to mislead the virus into coming out of hiding, which is an important step toward completely eliminating it from the body.
Breakthrough HIV Research: Key Points
Researchers have discovered a new method to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells, which could lead to a cure for HIV.
A New Development in the Cure of HIV
One of the biggest obstacles for researchers trying to find a treatment has been the virus’s capacity to hide inside certain white blood cells. It indicates that there is an HIV reservoir in the body that can reactivate and that neither medication nor the immune system can address.
Researchers at Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity have now shown how to make the virus visible, opening the door for its complete removal from the body.
Using mRNA Technology
Its foundation is mRNA technology, which gained notoriety during the Covid-19 pandemic when it was used into vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
Australian Research
The Melbourne team’s approach seemed to be a significant advancement on current strategies to force the virus out of hiding, but more research would be required to determine how best to kill it after that, according to Dr. Jonathan Stoye, a retrovirologist and emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute who was not involved in the study.
Expert Opinion: Major Advance
In the end, there is still a significant unknown. For success, do you have to get rid of the reservoir entirely or just the majority of it? Will it be enough to start a fresh infection if only 10% of the latent reservoir survives? Time will tell.
That does not lessen the importance of the current study, though, since it marks a significant potential advancement in the transport of mRNA to blood cells for therapeutic applications.
Significance
Professor Tomáš Hanke of the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute refuted the notion that RNA entry into white blood cells had proven to be a major obstacle. According to him, the idea that HIV might be found in every cell in the body was “just a dream.”
