Common antibiotic can fight HIV

In a startling announcement last week, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine said it has found a cheap medication which will help with the fight against HIV.

According to a press statement on the University’s website, an antibiotic known as minocycline helps target HIV infected immune cells, rendering them useless. The antibiotic has been in wide use since the 1970s as an anti-acne medication.

The drug could become an important co-medication for HIV-positive persons on antiretroviral therapy, the report continues.

Currently, the use of powerful — and expensive — antiretroviral medications are able to slow or stop the replication of HIV in the human body. But it has long been known that while the drugs suppress the virus, they do not stop it. And if a person on the medications stops, the virus soon rebounds. That new viral population is often immune to the previous drug therapy combination.

But in studies conducted in vitro and in monkeys with SIV, a close relative of HIV, found the addition of minocycline helped suppress the virus.

The success with the animal model prompted the team to study in test tubes whether minocycline treatment affected latency in human T cells infected with HIV. Using cells from HIV-infected humans on HAART, the team isolated the “resting” immune cells and treated half of them with minocycline. Then they counted how many virus particles were reactivated, finding completely undetectable levels in the treated cells versus detectable levels in the untreated cells.

The research found that the antibiotic disrupted certain ways in which the infected T-cells — part of the immune system infected by HIV, but necessary to infection response — is triggered into response, but did not prevent it from responding to other infections in the body.

Scientists said the use of the drug in combination with the antiretorvirals could establish and maintain an HIV-positive person’s latent, non-infectious disease state. This could lead to significant new legal issues around Michigan’s disclosure law. That law mandates that before a person who knows he or she is HIV-positive engages in sexual penetration, “however slight,” they must inform their partners. Failing to do so is a felony in Michigan.

That law was written in 1988, and went into effect in 1989. During that time, there were no completely effective treatments for HIV. In 1996, the FDA authorized the use of antiretrovirals, called euphemistically the cocktails. Studies soon proved that the medications reduced the number of virus in the blood, or viral load, to undetectable levels. In 2008, the Swiss high courts ruled that an HIV-positive person, who was on antiretroviral treatment for six months or more, had an undetectable viral load and no other sexually transmitted infections was no longer consider infectious under Swiss law.