Highly active antiretroviral therapy has been used to manage HIV, the virus that causes AIDS for a while now, it suppresses the deadly virus to virtually undetectable levels in the blood.
However if a patient stops therapy, there are silent reservoirs of HIV undetected by the immune system that spring to life and reignite the virus.
Satya Danekar, chair of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of California-Davis, is leading research into PEP005, a drug that can flush out this silent reservoir so the virus can be recognized and killed by the immune system.
“You flush the virus out from those latently infected cells and pull them out,” Danekar said. “And second, you have to depend on the ability of the immune system to now come and say, ‘Whoa, there’s the infected cell,’ and come and kill it,” Denekar said in the journal PLoS Pathogens.
She believes that a compound like PEP005 that awakens and kills the AIDS virus has the potential to completely cure the disease.