Francois Villinger led a team of researchers who successfully revealed HIV reservoir in lab monkeys using a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. The team hopes that this achievement could lead them to eliminate HIV infection with the kick and kill approach.
With the real-time imaging of the scanner, revealing all the hiding places of the world's foe, researchers hoped that this could lead them to combat the life threatening invasion of HIV's causing the deadly AIDS in humans.
The goal to eradicate the HIV infection started 2010 when Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi was able to identify the AIDS virus. Although there are other ways they team of Villinger tried just to track down the virus, it seems that all of the results revealed that the reservoirs are still undetectable.
Villinger stated that in order for the team to eliminate these HIV lurking sites, they need to identify first the tissues and cell, where these virus reservoirs could take place. In a paper published in the journal of Nature methods, Villinger's team were able to identify these reservoirs using the rhesus monkeys. These mammals were infected with simian, which is actually the same level with HIV.
When the PET scanner revealed the results, the team were able to identify that these sites are pointing to different specialized and scattered havens of the moneys, which include the colon, lymph nodes, genital tract and even the spongy bones along the nasal passages.
With the detection of these HIV's hiding places, according to Yahoo News, the drugs to use could now be targeted now to those sites, using the so called kick-and-kill approach. With the animal models used, the team is now finding non-invasive ways so that HIV eradication could also be applied to humans.
Despite this new discovery, according to an article posted in The Peninsula Qatar, the team is still on the wrestle of battling about the virus mutating capability.