HIV can evade treatment by hiding out within a patients’ own cells. Because they don’t always express tell-tale viral genes, the antiviral drugs cannot find and destroy them. But new research, published yesterday (July 25) in Nature, suggests that a cancer drug, known as vorinostat, may be the answer. After a single dose of vorinostat, which is used to treat certain types of lymphoma, patients experienced an almost 5-fold increase in HIV RNA expression
“HIV therapeutics is about to enter a new phase,” Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying Nature commentary. “Over the past 25 years, the focus has been almost entirely on developing and optimizing drugs aimed at inhibiting active HIV replication.” This has led to numerous antiretroviral therapies that turned HIV from a death sentence into a largely manageable disease. “But [these therapies] do not eliminate inactive viruses within cells,” Deeks ...
