New molecular scissors cut out lingering HIV—maybe once and for all

(credit: Ian Stannard via Flickr)

For the approximately 37 million people worldwide who are infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the newest cocktails of anti-retroviral drugs have come a long way in beating back the retrovirus and keeping an infection in check. Still, those drugs are no cure. While the treatments snarl the viral assembly line and thwart new infectious particles from invading the body’s cells, HIV itself is still there, hunkered in the DNA of a patient’s genome until there’s an opportunity for a comeback—say, when a patient goes off their medication.

As long as there’s lingering HIV, patients must keep taking the drugs, which cause side-effects, make for high prescription bills, and raise the threat of drug resistance. At least, that's the case for now. In a new study, scientists reveal a possible way to literally hack those lurking viruses out of a person's DNA strands.

With a custom enzyme made through coerced evolution, researchers selectively and reliably sliced HIV sequences from a number of cell types: bacteria, human cell lines used in research, in cells collected from patients with HIV infections, and in “humanized” mice with HIV. Though the strategy is early in development—far from clinical use—the data so far points to an effective and safe way to help drug treatments completely finish off HIV infections. This is a “promising strategy for future clinical applications,” the authors report.