“A new treatment strategy has shown promise in helping to transform HIV into a curable infection,” reports the Associated Press.

Key to the prospective new treatment: valproic acid, an anti-convulsant drug that’s shown promise in awakening HIV lurking in dormant cells.

An explanation of why this is important comes from the AP:

HIV infection is incurable because current drugs only work when the virus is multiplying, which occurs only when it is in an active cell. However, HIV sometimes infects dormant cells, and when it does, it becomes dormant itself. While the virus poses no threat in its resting state, the sleeping cells sporadically wake up, reactivating the virus and causing it to multiply. Patients must continue to take medications for the rest of their lives so they can fight the virus when it comes out of the reawakened cells. Only if every last infected dormant cell is wiped out - or the virus purged from these cells - can patients stop taking medication and be virus-free…

This most hopeful view is explicated by Dr. Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Institute for Virology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco:

"It's a first baby step, showing that maybe the use of [valproic acid]far more likely in combination with one or two other agentsmight be a viable approach for tackling this latency problem...The idea, if we could ever do it, is to purge every latently infected cell. Treat patients for probably two or three years, they'd be able to come off their antiretroviral therapy and they'd be virus-free."

But reinventing the future is never simple or easy, as Dr. Robert Siliciano, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who helped discover the dormant infection problem in the mid-1990s, tells the AP:

"It's extremely unlikely that this approach would work. It assumes something about the mechanism [of dormant HIV] which we don't know is true. The mechanism may involve other issues that are not affected by this drug....It's a little bit premature to be talking about a cure for HIV."

Still, it's nice to have it on the conceptual table.

Full story, complete with fascinating and frustrating drug trial results, here.