A Novel Gene Technique To Combat HIV

A recent study has proclaimed that the deadly AIDS virus, HIVdefine, can be ‘stopped dead in its tracks’, by making use of a revolutionary technique for ‘silencing’ genesdefine. This discovery has raised hopes of developing a treatment for AIDS without the use of potentially toxic anti-viral drugs.

RNA interference, a phenomenon wherein genesdefine are artificially silenced by using a natural molecular switch in the cell, can keep a check on the replication of HIVdefine in the human blood cells. This is what the scientists have discovered as an outcome of this study. The findings of the study are based on HIV-infected laboratory rodents. Scientists mixed the silenced RNAs with the antibody carriers and then injected them into the veins of the animals which carry human cells rather than their own.

Professor Premlata Shankar of Texas Tech University, who carried out the work at Harvard Medical School in Boston, was quoted as saying, “RNA interference has great potential as an antiviral treatment…We think it has real promise, but there is a lot more to be done.”

The results are the first of their kind to show that RNA interference is indeed successful in animals. “No one has demonstrated before that HIV infection can be stopped in vivo, not just in cell lines, but in animals. It implies it might work in humans”, said Priti Kumar, from Harvard Medical School.

But the bottom line is that more thorough animal studies are required to be undertaken, before the approach can be used on humans in clinical trials. A Nobel prize in 2006 for the discovery of RNA interference says it all.