Anti-parasite drug may provide new way to ...( A drug already used to treat parasit...),Health

A drug already used to treat parasitic infections, and once looked at for cancer, also attacks the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in a new and powerful way, according to research published today online in the open access journal Retrovirology.

Past research has established that HIV has learned to hide out in certain human cells where it is safe from the bodys counterattack, cells that come to serve as viral reservoirs. Operating from these havens, the virus slowly builds its numbers over more than a decade until it finally becomes capable of dismantling human immune defenses. In the end stages, this process leaves patients vulnerable to the opportunistic infections of AIDS. The newly published work explains for the first time how the virus makes chemical changes that keep its chosen reservoirs alive long past their normal lifespan. The new study also provides the first evidence that an existing ant-parasite drug can reverse this deadly longevity.

AIDS continues to take nearly 3 million lives worldwide each year, and novel treatment approaches are urgently needed, said Baek Kim, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. We think our results are profound because, in discovering exactly how HIV hides in the body, we think we have learned how to take away its hiding places. Without them, the virus would have a much harder time causing disease, said Kim, lead author of the new study.

Cell division is a process central to life. A parent cell divides into two cells, each containing copies of the same genes. This enables a single-cell human embryo to divide and grow into the vast number of cells that make up the human body. Different cell types divide at various speeds. T cells, for example, sense foreign organisms have invaded the body, and quickly divide and grow into a large, specifically designed army to attack the i
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