After endless efforts in finding a cure for Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), researchers are finally catching a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel.
A new center that will focus solely on eradicating the disease for good has been established; it was made possible with the help of global pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in partnership with the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.
At the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been giving new directives as to how concerned authorities should name new human infectious diseases in a way that won’t impact people or geographical locations negatively.
The partnership between GSK and UNC was presented in a report, in which they describe the method of ‘shock and kill’ they are trying on HIV. Basically, researchers believe in identifying the dormant HIV that already exists in patients’ immune cells, and then pushing the immune system to activate and eradicate the virus from the body.
The UNC-Chapel Hill campus is expected to become the host of the new center, where a mixed team of researchers from both GSK and UNC-Chapel Hill will work on discovering a cure for HIV/AIDS. Their focus is on testing and advancing some of the approaches presented by recent scientific studies, including the ‘shock and kill’ technique, in order to find a total cure for the virus.
HIV treatment has been relying heavily on using this new approach, which is now the focus in many research groups. For example, not longer than a week ago, Medical News Today published a report from the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) Research Centre in Canada on a molecule that could be used as a key player in the “shock and kill” treatment strategy.
UNC-Chapel Hill researchers are the first to identify the potential of the “shock and kill” treatment, but the new collaboration with GSK is expected to help them advance to clinical trials.
While HIV is on the track of being cured, Africa and Asia are facing a new type of antibiotic-resistant typhoid which has been spreading like fire across the continents, posing a major international health threat.
Welcome Trust scientists have been indexing hard-to-treat infections from 63 countries, and their report, published in Nature Genetics, showed that almost half of them have developed resistance to standard antibiotic treatments. They blame this situation on the fact that many doctors have abused antibiotic medicines.
Typhoid fever, a condition that takes a yearly death toll of 200,000 people, can no longer be treated by conventional medicine, and doctors are desperately looking for other – more expensive and less accessible – antibiotics to treat it.
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