Scientists' AIDS Breakthrough Opens Way to More Effective Treatments

American and British research scientists have finally established the structure of an important enzyme present within the HIV virus and other retroviruses, opening the way to more effective treatments. Integrase works a bit like cut-and-paste in a word processing programme - it allows HIV to insert a copy of its own genes into the sufferer's DNA.

Drugs have already been developed to block the action of integrase - Isentress, from Merc & Co., is one example. But until this breakthrough the structure of integrase wasn't known in detail and this meant the drugs' blocking actions weren't fully understood, making improvements a hit and miss affair.

After an amazing 40,000 attempts to analyse integrase, scientists from Harvard and Imperial College London were finally successful and can now begin to understand precisely how integrase inhibitor drugs work and how they can be improved. They have already been able to see how the Merck, and experimental Gilead drugs, bind to integrase blocking its action.

One of the researchers, Peter Cherepanov of Imperial College, said:

"Despite initially painstakingly slow progress and very many failed attempts, we did not give up and our effort was finally rewarded."

Globally, around 60 million people have been infected with HIV since records were kept. Twenty-five million have died of HIV-related illnesses and complications. Although, no cure or vaccine have yet been developed, drug treatments have proved able to extend life and keep many sufferers healthy.

United Nations data shows that 33.4 million people had contracted HIV by 2008 and 2 million had died of AIDS. The highest rates of infection and mortality are in sub-Saharan Africa. Sixty-seven percent of all people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan countries.

Apart from the therapeutic challenges of developing a vaccine against HIV or a cure for AIDS, there are huge problems with availability of treatment for the world's poorest people and problems of ignorance relating to transmission. As an example, a recent report from the UK's National Aids Trust showed that over 25 percent of British people did not know HIV could be contracted as a result of unprotected sex between two men. The same report showed that, of 63,500 adults infected with HIV in the UK in 2005, 33 percent were unaware they carried the virus.

Source for the integrase research study: www.nature.com