Scientists recently reported a huge breakthrough in treating one of the most impactful viruses in human history.
We've come a long way in HIV research in the last 50 years. It's gone from an unidentifiable, unavoidable, and unstoppable death sentence to a well-understood and completely manageable disease. People who have HIV today can live long, healthy lives and even engage in what used to be risky activities without endangering their partners.
One major breakthrough was antiretroviral therapy, or ART. It basically prevents any active virus present in the body from damaging the cells that it infects. But some viruses are clever. HIV can store its genetic material inside of cells and not activate it right away.
So you can't just take ART until all the active virus is gone and call yourself cured. That inactive virus is still waiting around in your body, so you have to take ART for the rest of your life. But there's a specific signal that that inactive virus is waiting for. It's kind of like an undercover spy waiting for a signal from headquarters to come out of hiding and get to work.
Scientists recently reported a huge breakthrough in treating one of the most impactful viruses. It's kind of like an undercover spy waiting for a signal from headquarters to come out of hiding and get to work. So if you can figure out what that secret signal is and mimic it, you can trick that inactive virus into coming out of hiding so that the ART can gobble it up on the spot.
And a group of scientists have recently figured out how to use nanoparticles full of mRNA, a technology that already changed the world a few years ago, to do exactly that. These cells have previously been pretty resistant to drug delivery mechanisms, so this in itself is a huge breakthrough. Then once they're inside the cells, the nanoparticles start releasing the mRNA, which acts as a set of instructions for the cells to temporarily start cranking out that secret signal that HIV is waiting for.
Once the virus is out in the open, the ART gets to work and kills it. And because mRNA is a single-use molecule, it gets naturally degraded once it's done its job. In theory, this approach could create a world where an HIV patient, instead of having to take ART for the rest of their life, could just be cured. Now so far, this has only been done on cells in a dish. There's a lot of safety and efficacy testing that still needs to be done before it could help an actual patient.
Luckily, this research was done in Australia, not in America. In America, funding for HIV research has been completely decimated in the past few months because it does not "promote the interests of the American people".
Credit to Dr Cal
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Once the virus is out in the open, the ART gets to work and kills it. And because mRNA is a single-use molecule, it gets naturally degraded once it's done its job.