HIV-AIDS Cure News Update 2017: Biomarker for Latent HIV Infection Could Be Clue to Completely Eradicate Virus

While antiretroviral therapy with virus-suppressing drugs has made significant progress in reducing the deadliness of the disease, a complete cure still eludes the worldwide medical community. Researchers have found a biomarker molecule that can be a first step to designing treatments that can completely eliminate the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and not just suppress the viral load in a patient.

It's the first time that AIDS researchers have found a way to distinguish HIV-free cells from healthy cells that carry latent HIV. According to MedPage Today, investigators have discovered a molecule that can serve as a biomarker to target cells that are latently infected with the virus.

The findings, as reported in the science journal Nature, opens the possibilities for research about ways at destroying the HIV "reservoir." This reservoir, cells scattered around a patient's body that carry the virus, have been the bane of treatments that promise to cure HIV infection by suppressing the virus, only to find them rebounding in numbers sometime after treatment is stopped.

The marker molecule, called "CD32a" for now, has been detected on the surface of about half of the latently infected T-cells in their sample. Interestingly, the marker is not present in cells with an active HIV infection, and it is also not detected on uninfected cells. These findings have been reported by a team led by Monsef Benkirane, PhD, of the Institute of Human Genetics in Montpellier, France.

Finding a way to destroy the virus in latently infected cells has been an active area in AIDS research. Many teams have focused on reactivating latent HIV so conventional antiviral treatments can sweep them away.

This new development provides an alternative to the "kick and kill" method — if this and more biomarkers are discovered, treatments could be tailor-made to kill latent HIV, possibly leading to complete cures.