New AIDS Therapy Nukes HIV With Radioactive Antibodies

Like guided missiles, radioactive anti-HIV antibodies seek out and destroy HIV-infected cells.
The new approach to AIDS therapy -- called radioimmunotherapy -- works in mice, report Ekaterina Dadachova, PhD, of New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and colleagues.
"Radioimmunotherapy is supposed to be curative," Dadachova tells WebMD. "Current HIV treatments kill the virus, but it will come back because it hides in latently infected cells. Our goal is to go after those cells, so radioimmunotherapy has the potential to cure somebody completely."
Dadachova's colleague, Harris Goldstein, MD, tempers his enthusiasm a bit more. Goldstein is director of the Einstein/MMC Center for AIDS Research in New York.
"If we had a nickel for every time HIV was cured we'd all be very wealthy," Goldstein tells WebMD. "But it is exciting when a new conceptual approach comes along. What makes this treatment unique is that it is designed to target HIV infected cells and kill them. This really has the potential to markedly reduce the viral infection in patients."

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