New way to fight HIV

New research offers a way of fighting multi-drug resistant strains of HIV that are becoming increasingly common.

New research suggests that targeting a protein that helps repair DNA damage in human cells could provide a new way of fighting HIV infection, reports Prensa Latina news agency.

This approach might offer a way of fighting multi-drug resistant strains of HIV that are becoming increasingly common, according to the New Scientist magazine.

Most HIV drugs work by aiming at proteins produced by the HIV virus itself. But because HIV has a short lifecycle and readily mutates, the proteins it produces quickly evolve to become resistant to these antiretroviral drugs, researchers found.

The study shows that blocking one of the key cellular proteins, which regulates a cell´s response to DNA damage, can stop HIV from capturing it and using it to create thousands more copies of itself.

Inhibiting the ataxia-telangiectasia-mutated protein in human cells exposed to HIV stopped the virus from joining many of the exposed cells' DNA and instead triggered their demise, said Mark O'Connor, head of biology at Kudos Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Britain.