A 'kick and kill' strategy that forces the human immunodeficiency virus out of the cells - making it vulnerable to injections of natural killer cells - offers hope for an HIV cure.

In laboratory experiments on 10 mice, the method was found to eliminate the virus in 40 percent of cases, said a team from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

According to the UN, an estimated 38 million people worldwide are currently living with HIV, with the virus leading to around 36 million deaths in recent decades.

If refined and proven safe and effective in human trials, the concept could eliminate the need for people with HIV to be dependent on ongoing courses of antiretroviral drugs.

A "kick and kill" strategy that forces the human immunodeficiency virus (the image) out of the cells - and thus makes it vulnerable to existing antiviral drugs - gives hope for an HIV cure

The study was conducted by infectious disease specialist Jocelyn Kim from UCLA and her colleagues.

"These results demonstrate proof-of-concept for a therapeutic strategy to potentially remove HIV from the body, a task that had been almost insurmountable for many years," said Dr. Kim.

'The study opens a new paradigm for a possible HIV cure in the future.'

At present, people with HIV take so-called antiretroviral drugs, which instead of killing the virus act to inhibit it at various stages in its 'life cycle' - such as. when it penetrates a host cell or when it grinds. out of new copies of itself.

Although this may suppress the virus to the extent that the host's viral load becomes both undetectable and non-transmissible, HIV will still remain dormant in their system and hide in CD4 + T cells, which usually help coordinate immune responses.

When people with HIV stop taking their antiretroviral treatment, the virus can escape from these boltholes and continue to replicate itself in the body - weakening the immune system and increasing the risk of potentially deadly cancers and infections.

The team's strategy - which they have dubbed 'kick and kill' and were first proposed back in 2017 - works by tricking the dormant virus into the infected cells to reveal itself using a compound called 'SUW133' so it can be targeted and eliminated.

In a previous study, which looked at HIV-infected mice whose immune systems had been altered to match humans, the experts found that treatment with both SUW133 and antiretroviral agents killed up to 25 percent of the infected cells within 24 hours.

Looking for a more effective way to remove the infected cells, the researchers instead turned to so-called natural killer cells, which are produced by the body's immune system, which, as the name suggests, can kill infected cells or tumor cells.

By injecting healthy natural killer cells along with SUW133, which flushes HIV out of hiding, the team was able to completely eliminate HIV from 4 out of 10 infected mice.

The researchers were careful to analyze the mice's spleen in particular, as this organ is known to house immune cells such as the CD4 + T cells, in which HIV can lie dormant.

With their initial study completed, the researchers are now working to refine their approach so as to successfully eliminate HIV in 100 percent of mouse cohorts in future experiments.

"We will also move this research toward preclinical studies in non-human primates with the ultimate goal of testing the same approach on humans," said Dr. Kim.

The full results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.