Researchers at Yeshiva University announced this week that radiation can kill HIV, news that’s being heralded as “real potential” as a possible cure for the virus.
The Times of Israel reports:
Typically, those suffering from AIDS, the incurable disease caused by the HIV virus, are treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy, a cocktail of drugs that “keeps the virus from multiplying by killing the virus in the bloodstream” but doesn’t flush out HIV because it can’t “completely eliminate the HIV-infected cells in which the virus can replicate,” Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine said in a press release Tuesday.
But by using radioimmunotherapy, a team from the Albert Einstein College was able to “reduce HIV infection to undetectable levels” in the majority of blood samples taken from HIV patients who were being treated with antiretroviral therapy.
The treatment also offers possibilities to completely remove HIV from the body by potentially solving one of the main problems with anti-retroviral therapy treatments, which “do not efficiently penetrate the blood-brain barrier, a system of blood vessels that stops harmful substances from crossing into the brain,” the university said, meaning that despite the drug treatment, the HIV virus can linger in the brain and central nervous system cells.
“We found that radioimmunotherapy could kill HIV-infected cells both in blood samples that received antiretroviral treatment and within the central nervous system, demonstrating RIT offers real potential for being developed into an HIV cure,” said team leader Dr. Ekaterina Dadachova.
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