One of the most elusive tricks of HIV is its ability to "hide out" in the body even after being reduced to undetectable levels. Researchers have been frustrated for decades by their failure to pin down how and where the virus was managing to escape from ever more powerful treatments. Score another one for the good guys; all those billions spent on research are finally beginning to pay off.

AIDS hiding place found

I neglected to mention that this breakthrough reopens the question of finding a cure not just a treatment for HIV. Even after all these years my ability to overlook the obvious continues to amaze me.

Very good news. Thanks for the link.

Some follow up research on above:

Closing in on hard-to-kill HIV

Scientists in the U.S. moved closer to identifying a way to find drugs that would help rid patients of the hardest-to-reach pockets of HIV that now defy treatment.

Current anti-HIV drugs reduce the virus to undetectable levels without eradicating it. The virus survives by lying dormant in immune-system cells.

Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, both in Maryland, tested 2,400 chemicals and found 17 that coaxed the virus out of hiding, kick-starting its normal process of replication. That would make the virus susceptible to drugs.

The best performer was a compound called 5HN found in the leaves, bark and roots of the black walnut tree.

The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

To my great surprise this obvious area for HIV research is just now being seriously pursued. I actually assumed that scientists had been checking all this out for decades. Maybe the cost of DNA analysis has finally declined enough to make this approach feasible.

Whatever the reason, I am certainly glad that the research on the reason(s) long term non-progressors so successfully resist the virus is finally going forward.

Rare 'Outliers' drive research

Another major resevoir for HIV has been discovered. "Investigators found that the virus can infect certain kinds of bone marrow cells that are the parents ("progenitors") of blood cells."

HIV hides out in bone marrow.

This is one of those good news/bad news articles: good that researchers ferreted out another of HIV's hideyholes, bad that this resevoir will be particularly difficult to attack.