Recent Discoveries That Could Revolutionize Medicine-Disarming HIV

HIV/AIDS kills around 1.8 million people a year, and ranks as the third leading cause of death in low-income countries. But a recent study in journal Blood presents a potentially new way to combat the disease: instead of killing the virus, make the body resistant to it. When a person is infected, the body's innate immune system provides an immediate but flawed defense; HIV takes its membrane or "skin" from the cell that it infects.

Researchers led by scientists at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University exposed HIV by removing cholesterol from this cellular wall, producing a large hole in the virus's membrane and making it permeable, which in turn led to a stronger adaptive response, orchestrated by immune cells. While researchers have lengths to go before they can even think to announce a cure for HIV, this breakthrough could drastically reduce the amount of resources devoted to treating and combating the disease and provide insight into fighting similarly complex diseases in the future.