Possible AIDS cure?

[swestrup]

Thanks to a heads-up from blacksquiggles, here is an article about a new class of anti-AIDS drugs recently developed by a collaboration between Rutgers University and Johnson and Johnson. Scientists are really optimistic about the possibility of this leading to an actual cure.

Comments

[maytricks.livejournal.com]

fantastic!

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Ok, so their drug "adapts" itself? That's incredible. As in "not credible". As in "show me how exactly, otherwise I won't believe it".

Of course, this article is remarkably dumbed down. I'd be interested in reading the paper, because this sounds like "trust us, we've got something, give us money!" to me. It happens every 6 to 18 months in the HIV research (and probably other fields, it's just the one I know about). I've seen some of these "we've just about found a cure!" papers, and I could point the failure, despite not being a microbiologist myself.

This also highlights one of my big problem of the academic (as opposed to private) research community, as it tends to form cliques that will let such piece of garbage papers slip through, to get funding. When you have a field that has 3 researchers, they know each others and will often do something like let one of them (in rotation) get a nearly useless paper accepted somewhere impressive (like Nature) to suck in the funds. Mind you, the private sector has it's own horrible failings too, leaving me rather depressed overall about research.

[blacksquiggles.livejournal.com]

I believe they can't call it a *cure* until it's been through testing...
from the information I was given, it's been paid for already, it's been tested, more testing is needed but it will be released *soon*

I guess we'll wait and see :D

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Found exactly one article about this compound on PubMed, seems to be a high-level review and is only from a year ago. It's very light on details. It seems to be more a prevention than a cure, anyway.

From what I'm familiar with (which you can read about here), we're currently boned. I saw the X-ray crystallographic data, you wouldn't believe the contorsions HIV-1 is "willing" to go through in order to keep going.

[swestrup]

I've never had much luck with PubMed researching anything. I wish there were better free online resources.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much the only one, free or not. Other than that, you have to go and look at each journal's sites. It's rather tricky to use, though, because of the way abstracts are worded, I think. For example, a search for AIDS leads you nowhere useful. A search on NN-RTI will give a few, but not much. But "pyrophosphorillation" (unsurprisingly, I'm not sure of the spelling) will yield a ton of information on nucleotide analog RT inhibitors. Or is that non-nucleotide analogs? Oh well.