A cure for AIDS will be discovered within the next decade, according to an internationally renowned Australian expert. Professor Sharon Lewin, head of the infectious diseases unit at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, says the real challenge would be making the cure accessible to many.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Professor Lewin's research has primarily focuses on how to kill the AIDS virus when it is dormant in the body. Unlocking the cure would involve "waking up" the sleeping virus and then killing it.
"We will have a high-tech solution but then we will need to make it simple enough and cheap enough to be delivered to a lot of people.
"The main reason we can't cure HIV is because it goes into a hiding spot in the body and it goes to sleep while we are treating the patient with drugs, but when we stop the drugs the virus wakes up. I think the most promising approach is to using drugs that can wake up the sleeping virus and then kill it.
"This is a very smart virus ... From the outside there is no way to tell the difference between a cell that has the virus and one that doesn't."
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