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A 'kick and kill' strategy that forces the human immunodeficiency virus out of cells — leaving it vulnerable to injections of natural killer cells — offers hope of an HIV cure.
In laboratory tests on 10 mice the approach was found to eliminate the virus in 40 per cent of cases, a team from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) said.
According to the UN, an estimated 38 million people worldwide are presently living with HIV, with the virus having led to some 36 million deaths in recent decades.
If refined and proven safe and effective in human trials, the concept could remove the need for people with HIV to depend on ongoing courses of antiretroviral drugs.
A 'kick and kill' strategy that forces the human immunodeficiency virus (pictured) out of cells — thereby making it vulnerable to existing antivirals — offers hope of an HIV cure
The study was undertaken by infectious disease specialist Jocelyn Kim of the UCLA and her colleagues.
'These findings show proof-of-concept for a therapeutic strategy to potentially eliminate HIV from the body, a task that had been nearly insurmountable for many years,' said Dr Kim.
'The study opens a new paradigm for a possible HIV cure in the future.'
At present, people with HIV take so-called antiretroviral medications which, rather than killing the virus, act to inhibit it at various stages in its 'life cycle' — such as, for example, when it enters a host cell or when it churns out new copies of itself.
While this can suppress the virus to the extent that the host's viral load becomes both undetectable and untransmissible, HIV will still remain dormant in their system, hiding out in CD4+ T cells, which normally help coordinate immune responses.
When people with HIV stop taking their antiretroviral treatment, the
