Towards an HIV cure

Around the world, millions of people are infected with the AIDS virus, HIV. And although drug treatments can successfully suppress the virus to undetectable levels, rather like taking your foot off the brake in a car parked on a hill, if you stop taking the medication, the virus rapidly returns with a flourish and regains its momentum. And that’s because it has the ability to insert the genetic code of the virus into our DNA and then hide in an inactive state in various cells around the body. So if we want to rid the body of HIV we have to discover a way to flush out the virus from these hiding places. And this week, two papers were published in the journal Nature proposing two new ways we might be able to do that. Chris Smith spoke to Harvard researcher Mathias Lichterfeld, who wrote an article about the new research, to ask him to explain what’s been discovered…