Achieving a major milestone in the mankind's fight against the dreaded AIDS,

Israeli scientists find way to destroy HIV-AIDS
Monday, September 6, 2010, 10:05 [IST]

tags: hiov aids cure, israel scintists, destroy infected cells, human animal trials, healthy, medical journal, researchers


Jerusalem, Sep 6: Achieving a major milestone in the mankind's fight against the dreaded AIDS, scientists have developed a method that can wipe out HIV infected cells.

Israeli scientists have figured out a way to wipe out all the HIV infected cells without affecting the healthy ones, a medical journal said.

According to the latest edition of the British journal AIDS Research and Therapy, although the researchers have registered an Israeli patent, the treatment must still go through trials on animals and humans, which means that it would be a while before it is available to the public.

As to how the method would work, the journal said that peptides, unique short protein segments developed by the researchers, can interfere with replication and at the same time overwhelm the infected cell, triggering its self-destruction.

"It is our view that the results described in this work suggest a novel approach to specifically promote death of HIV-1 infected cells and thus may eventually be developed into a new and general anti-viral therapy," the researchers are quoted as saying in the journal.

"The usual medications kill the virus that has entered the body during infection and the (peptide) treatment allows cells infected with the genetic load of the virus to be killed," they added.