AN understanding of the devastating alliance between HIV and tuberculosis may point the way to new methods of treating HIV infection.
Simultaneous HIV and TB infections tend to make each other worse. Scientists think HIV helps the TB bacterium by weakening the body’s immune defences. But how TB encourages the AIDS virus has been unclear.
Now Michael Weiden of New York University Medical Center and his colleagues have shown that the TB bacterium cuts levels of proteins that inhibit DNA replication, so replication rates increase (Journal of Experimental Medicine, vol 188, p 1255). This may arouse HIV from its latent state in the DNA of white blood cells.
Weiden suggests the finding may lead to ways of flushing out latent HIV that lies hidden from anti-HIV drugs.
Advertisement
