Posted on December 15, 2016
Source: PBS NewsHour
"The HIV research community is increasingly optimistic about the promising 'shock and kill' approach to eradicating HIV from infected patients. Such removal of all traces of the virus from an individual’s body would represent an actual cure for AIDS.
A new small-scale human trial of the treatment is starting this week in New York and two sister sites, in Germany and Denmark. The trial will combine an anticancer drug, romidepsin, with antiretroviral drugs, also known as ARVs.
Another small human study will start in January, followed by a larger human shock and kill trial in June.
Shock and kill combines standard ARVs with an immune booster, a combo that’s been effective in test tube, animal and now human trials. The treatment flushes out and eradicates pockets of HIV, which lie inactive inside dormant immune cells even as antiretroviral drugs reduce the actively reproducing virus to undetectable levels in the blood.
The new trials follow validating shock and kill data from University of California, San Francisco researchers, shared at the HIV Cure Summit, held on Dec. 1 at UCSF."
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