New Target in Treating HIV

Researchers over at the Indiana University School of Medicine believe there is a new target in the war against the HIV virus.

An HIV protein known as NEF has been known to help develop the HIV virus into a full blown AIDS case. Until recently, there is no known way to fight NEF as such, it has never been a target for drug treatment in HIV patients.

Researchers at Indiana University, however, discovered that a variant of another protein, this one involved in HIV pathogenesis has shown itself to be capable of suppressing the production of the NEF protein.

Researchers hoped that a drug affecting Nef could complement existing therapies to provide protection against the virus.

The current treatment for HIV/AIDS is highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART)- a combination of drugs that target two HIV enzymes - reverse transcriptase (RT) and protease (PR) or RT or PR inhibitors.

The source of this article is found here.

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