[kevin2r]

Question. How is that even knowing the lifecycle of HIV at this level of detail, there is not a cure for it?

[rqs]

I Googled it for you:

https://www.ted.com/talks/janet_iwasa_why_it_s_so_hard_to_cu...

https://www.seeker.com/will-we-ever-cure-hiv-1792546668.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS

Also you may interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Berlin_Patient

[jacobwilliamroy]

>in the U.S. HIV kills 10,000 people per year

I remember an early passage from Buckminster Fuller's Grunch of Giants where he tells the reader to visualize fully packed stadium and explains that's what 10,000 people looks like.

[piker]

I'm not sure 10,000 packs a stadium in the US. Maybe the bleachers of a high school football stadium.

[j9461701]

Ha, my thoughts were similar to yours but in the opposite direction: With such complicated machinery being involved in every part of micro biology, how can humans ever hope to cure anything? Everything down there is so complex, fast and intricate and we're stuck up here able to interact with it only in the most brute force and imprecise ways.

[pdm55]

I think the general strategy to fight HIV is to try to disrupt one or two key events of the process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS

[kevin2r]

Yeah, that's what I would imagine, it is a chain of events so you could disrupt the process breaking one step, which one? I can't tell. But I know for sure that we are smarter than those micro organisms trying to do their thing :)

[stenl]

One major issue is the fact that reverse transcriptase, which copies the HIV genome inside the cell, is sloppy and makes lots of mistakes. As a consequence, every viral particle produced is a little different. A drug that targets any given HIV protein to disrupt it, will work on most particles, but there’s always some that carry mutations that allow them to escape. The solution is to treat with multiple orthogonal drugs.

However,a second major issue is what’s mentioned in the movie, that the viral genome integrates into the host genome and can lie dormant for years. So even if you kill off every single viral particle, years later new particles can be produced from the dormant genome.

A third major issue is that HIV specifically infects T cells, which are the very immune cells that are supposed to combat infection. This weakens the natural defenses, and also makes it difficult to create a successful vaccine.

[sytelus]

I would think that once you kill all infected T-cells, yo got rid of all infection?

[kneel]

I doubt a body can completely rid itself of HIV but once you get rid of all infected T-cells you've Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

[Gibbon1]

One of the problems is that HIV stitches it's DNA into the cells DNA. The result is a latent infection reservoir that can last decades.

[cryoshon]

the crazy thing is that's not even the main part of the "viral reservoir."

even when medicated -- for decades -- viral particles hang out safely in the body, often in the lymph nodes. as soon as the medication stops, they bounce back.