14 DAY TRIAL // The news that a team of Australian researchers made a major breakthrough in terms of finding a cure for AIDS is taking the online community by storm.
Thus, it was this Wednesday when Professor David Harrich, presently working with the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, stepped forward and stated that he and his fellow AIDS researchers had figured out a way to toy with the HIV virus and make it turn against itself.
What Professor David Harrich means is that, with the help of an altered protein, they managed to keep the virus from growing and further affecting a person's organism.
TNT Magazine reports that this researcher's precise statements on the matter at hand were as follows:
“I consider that this is fighting fire with fire. What we've actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we've changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly.”
However, altering the HIV virus in this manner does not mean that AIDS is now a curable medical condition.
As the researchers explain, their findings can, for the time being at least, only translate into protecting human cells from AIDS and not into curing them altogether.
“This therapy is potentially a cure for AIDS. So it's not a cure for HIV infection, but it potentially could end the disease.So this protein present in immune cells would help to maintain a healthy immune system so patients can handle normal infections,” the professor wished to emphasize.
Following their laboratory-based experiments, the researchers plan to carry out clinical trials and investigate whether or not their method of dealing with HIV and AIDS might one day replace the other treatments now made available to people suffering with this medical condition.
“Drug therapy targets individual enzymes or proteins and they have one drug, one protein. They have to take two or three drugs, so this would be a single agent that essentially has the same effect. So in that respect, this is a world-first agent that's able to stop HIV with a single agent at multiple steps of the virus lifecycle,” David Harrich stated.