A drug normally used to treat alcohol abuse will be tested for it’s effectiveness in eliminating the last vestiges of HIV in the body, Bloomberg News reported.Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and Johns Hopkins University will recruit 20 HIV-infected people for a clinical trial of the drug Antabase to see if it is capable of clearing up residual viruses that current AIDS drugs leave behind.
If the drug is successful, it may mean that HIV patients would be able to go off medications without having to worry about the disease coming back – in other words, it would essentially be a cure for AIDS.
Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, is leading the trial, which is based on lab experiments on Antabuse, or disulfiram, on latent HIV by Robert Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
Though he doesn’t believe Antabuse will cure AIDS, he hopes the study will help direct future research on the disease.
“No single drug is likely to be able to eliminate these reservoirs,” Siliciano said. “It’s going to come down to some sort of combination of agents.”