Wired News: HIV Treatment Raises Cure Hopes

Valproic acid--a cure for HIV infection?

Wired News: HIV Treatment Raises Cure Hopes: "'The idea, if we could ever do it, is to purge every latently infected cell. Treat patients for probably two or three years, they'd be able to come off their antiretroviral therapy and they'd be virus-free,' he said.

The study, led by Dr. David Margolis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tested the ability of valproic acid to reduce the number of infected dormant cells.

Four patients on standard therapy were given the pills to take twice daily for three months. The size of this pool of infected dormant cells decreased by 75 percent in three out of the four patients, the study found.

'This finding, though not definitive, suggests that new approaches will allow the cure of HIV in the future,' Margolis said. 'It's a significant conceptual move forward.'

Margolis said he believes the drug reactivates the virus inside a dormant cell, either waking up the cell with it or killing it. Dr. Jean-Pierre Routy, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who also studies the dormant HIV issue, said Margolis' results were an impressive first try.

'It's enormous for just three months' treatment to have such an effect,' he said, adding that the findings merit urgent further study. 'I think it's very exciting news.'

However, other experts were less optimistic. 'It's extremely unlikely that this approach would work,' said Dr. Robert Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who was one of the scientists who discovered the dormant infection problem in the mid-1990s. 'It assumes something about the mechanism which we don't know is true. The mechanism may involve other issues that are not affected by this drug.'

'It didn't get all the cells. That's probably because it's not really targeting the right mechanism for latency,' Siliciano said. 'It's got to be a 99.9999 percent reduction to be useful. When you stop the drugs the virus explodes back so quickly, even if you had one latently infected cell left, in a matter of days you would be back to where you started from.'

Siliciano said he also doubts the valproic acid approach will solve the problem because it's likely HIV lies dormant in other types of cells that scientists have not discovered yet and tackling those reservoirs may require a completely different approach.

'It's a little bit premature to be talking about a cure for HIV,' he said."