HIV Digest	HIV Digest Archive

In a recent preliminary study, the anticonvulsant drug valproic acid was used to awaken dormant HIV, providing hope for an eventual treatment to eradicate it from the body.

Current HIV drugs only work when HIV multiplies, which only occurs when infected cells are activated. Many cells remain HIV-infected but not activated. Only if every dormant virus was flushed out, or every dormant cell wiped out, could patients become virus-free and stop taking medication for the rest of their lives, say experts.

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Other drugs that decreased the latent pool of virus have been either too weak or had toxic side effects. Valproic acid shows more promise, said Dr. Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Institute for Virology and Immunology at the University of California-San Francisco. Greene was not involved in the study but conducts similar research. "It's a first baby step, showing that maybe the use of [this type of drug]-- far more likely in combination with one or two other agents-- might be a viable approach for tackling this latency problem," said Greene. "The idea, if we could ever do it, is to purge every latently infected cell. Treat patients for probably two or three years, they'd be able to come off their antiretroviral therapy and they'd be virus-free."

In the study, Dr. David Margolis, of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and colleagues tested valproic's effect in four patients taking twice-daily doses over three months. The study found that the pool of dormant HIV-infected cells was cut by 75 percent in three of the patients.

Others think talk of a cure is premature. "It didn't get all the cells," said Dr. Robert Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "That's probably because it's not really targeting the right mechanism for latency. It's got to be a 99.9999 percent reduction to be useful. When you stop the drugs the virus explodes back so quickly, even if you had one latently infected cell left, in a matter of days you would be back to where you started from."

Editor's Note: from the Associated Press