HIV, AIDS cure news update: Scientists extract HIV DNA from living tissue - one step closer to cure

In a major breakthrough that has brought the world one step closer to an HIV cure, scientists have managed to remove the DNA of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from living tissue for the very first time.

A team of researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University report in the journal Gene Therapy that they were able to successfully remove HIV-1 genes from the genomes of rats and mice infected with the virus.

The team, led by Kamel Khalil, director of the Comprehensive NeuroAIDS Center at Temple University, announced that they managed to "cut out" the viral genes with a pair of molecular scissors that they created using a gene editing technique known as CRISPR. The technique allowed the scientists to snip out the HIV genes while leaving no adverse effects on the host cells.

"In a proof-of-concept study, we show that our gene editing technology can be effectively delivered to many organs of two small animal models and excise large fragments of viral DNA from the host cell genome," Khalil said. The Temple University team hopes that this could someday lead to the elimination of HIV from humans as well.

At present, HIV treatment relies on various antiretrovirals, and while these do prevent the human immunodeficiency virus from replicating, they do not serve as a cure. Worse, when antiretroviral therapy is interrupted, the virus replication rebounds. When this happens, the patient is put at risk of developing acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

If doctors could one day eliminate HIV from human genomes, the disease could finally be cured.

In the study, Khalil and his team studied the CRISPR technique's ability to remove HIV DNA from both rats and mice, and found that it successfully cut out the virus in more than half of the cells. According to Khalil, the process was "very simple" and would not be a complicated procedure even when used on human patients.

"If this technology gets into the clinic to treat human patients, it's not going to be very complicated," he told Time. "You don't have to bring the patient to the clinic and do a bone marrow transplant or all kinds of complicated technology. You can basically apply this to any setting."

The next step for Khalil and his team is to conduct a larger study on animals, after which they hope to be able to do a clinical trial for human patients.