Here in the United States, HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was — but that doesn’t mean it’s solved, not by a mile. Nearly 37 million people are living with HIV internationally, and as Charlie Sheen’s recent announcement proves, no one, no matter how rich or famous or tiger-blood infused, is immune to the disease.
Treatments exist to manage the effects of HIV, and though expensive, these antiretroviral therapies (ART) have proved instrumental in slowing the progress of this global epidemic. Slowing, but not stopping.
Despite monumental research, funding, and effort, a cure for HIV has remained out of reach.
Today brings new hope, though. According to just-published findings by researchers from the University of Melbourne and UC San Francisco, we may be closer than ever to finding a cure. When researchers administered disulfiram, a drug designed to treat alcoholism, to HIV positive patients on antiretroviral medication, something amazing happened: dormant HIV cells in their bodies were activated. And once dormant HIV cells are activated, they can be killed.
As reported by Medical News Today:
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) is the primary treatment for HIV, involving a combination of at least three antiretroviral drugs that slow disease progression. While the treatment has led to reductions in HIV death rates worldwide, it is not a cure.
ART is unable to eliminate HIV from patients completely; the virus can lay dormant in cells, hiding from immune system attack. But in their phase 2 clinical trial, the researchers found disulfiram helped “wake up” dormant HIV cells, allowing them to be destroyed — a “shock-and-kill” approach that researchers believe is key to curing the virus.
And unlike existing treatments designed to activate dormant HIV cells, disulfiram created no adverse side effects in patients during the study (via Reuters).
There’s still much work to be done before a cure for HIV can be found. According to Dr. Julian Elliott, one of the researchers who worked on the study, there is an “enormous amount still to learn about how to ultimately eradicate this very smart virus.” But this is clearly a positive step toward eradicating a disease that has devastated the world for a long time. Thanks to medical breakthroughs like these, hopefully Charlie Sheen’s HIV announcement will one day be looked back on as nothing more than a difficult chapter of his life that was ultimately overcome.
Not unlike Men at Work.
