Re: Why is AIDS research not getting anywhere?

Hi Alison,

Actually, HIV research is getting somewhere... but slowly.

First, many new drugs are put on the market each year on specific protein 
targets of HIV-1 (either reverse transcriptase, protease and, hopefully, 
integrase). These drugs help HIV seropositive individuals to live a longer 
and healthier life than ever before.

For vaccines, well it is not so easy than it appears.  HIV is mutating very 
rapidly (1 base is mutated at every replication cycle; 10exp7 replication 
event per day for an infected individual) to the point where in any given 
infected individuals, there are multiple quasi-species (many different 
strains of HIV arising from only one strain).  As the point of a vaccine is 
to direct the immune system to respond to a particular strain of virus (or 
bacteria), multiple strains in one individual lead to unresponsiveness to 
the treatment (in fact, the individual respond well to the particular 
strain that was targeted by the vaccine but many other strains are left to 
grow...).

Moreover, HIV hides in many places (like the brain) where it can stay 
"latent" for many years so that someone could think he is "cured" and still 
stay infected with HIV (which could be later reactivated...).

Another problem is that HIV integrates itself to the genome of the 
individual so that, in order to cure an individual, you have to kill every 
infected cell in his body, which is very hard to do without harming the 
person.

T cells do grow in culture but it is not very useful because it is not very 
practical on a large scale and it is very costly.  Moreover, as soon as you 
would inject healthy T cells to someone who is infected, they would easily 
become infected.  In addition, injecting someone with T cells is pretty 
much like an organ transplant, you have to be sure that the host is 
compatible with the donor or you will have to give immunosupressant to the 
host (something you don't want to give to a HIV seropositive individual 
since he will become immunosuppressed already because of its infection!).

Some of the most brilliant scientist (and a myriad of less brilliant 
scientist... like myself) work on this problem since the 1980's and still 
find difficulties to overcome before achieving a "cure" for HIV.

But we are definitely nearer now than 10 years ago and present HIV 
seropositive individuals will most assuredly live a long and healthy life 
before they begin to feel the onset of AIDS... if they follow medication of 
course!

Finally, genital (and labial) herpes is on the rise and maybe even more 
than HIV in the US and Canada.  The fact is that there is more publicity 
for HIV than herpes and that HIV has a lot more impact on people's lives 
than herpes (although this infection is not a pleasant one, it is not 
deadly...).

I hope that it answered your question,

thanks for asking,

Ciao!

Mike