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news.Researchers from the San Francisco-based University of California and Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University are in the process of recruiting 20 HIV- infected people for a trial of the Odyssey Pharmaceuticals-manufactured, cocaine and alcohol addiction treatment drug Antabuse (disulfiram).
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The trial, which began last month and is scheduled to finish in June 2011, aims to determine whether Antabuse can deplete the pool of residual virus that regular AIDS drugs fail to clear, bloomberg.com reported.
The study is the latest in a series of attempts made to eradicate latent reservoirs of HIV, and if it is successful, Antabuse administration will allow patients to go off their medications without the disease rebounding, the news agency reported.
The AIDS virus survives by avoiding detection by AIDS drugs (designed to block replication) because it switches off the normal process of copying itself inside certain cells.
Once patients stop taking medication, HIV reactivates and surges back.
However, Antabuse administration would prevent the virus from exiting its host cell by blocking the methyl transferase enzyme that helps HIV go to sleep in cells.
This would kickstart replication, making the virus visible to antiretroviral drugs roaming around the body.
It is expected that the virus would die within hours with nowhere else to go.
The trial is based on an as-yet-unpublished laboratory experiments about the effect of Antabuse on latent HIV by Johns Hopkins University professor of medicine Robert Siliciano.