印度医学博士研制出可以消灭艾滋病毒的酶

Bangalore: Dr Indrani Sarkar hashas every reason to be excited. Her PhD thesis, which started in 2002at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany, has thrown open thedoors for developing enzymes that can destroy the dreaded HumanImmuno-deficiency Virus or HIV within infected cells permanently.

Indraniand a team of scientists have developed an enzyme called Tre. Tre is acustom enzyme capable of detecting, recognising and destroying HIV,much like a pair of molecular scissors.

"Inlaymans terms, it's an engineered enzyme which recognises sequences inthe HIV genome that is duplicated, integrated virus and by the processof recombination, it cuts out the virus from the genome," says she.

The biggest challenge with treating HIV today is that the virus becomes dormant and often develops resistance to HIV drugs.

Theonly way then to cure HIV is to get rid of the virus completely andTre, the enzyme that Indrani constructed after a year and its 126"cycles of mutation" totally deplete HIV in the human genome in threemonths in laboratory conditions.

"It'sa beautiful approach, but like any other drug, this one too will take afew years to reach clinics — anywhere between five and 20 yearsactually. A lot of research has to be done because since one is workingwith a novel enzyme, one has to engineer the enzyme," says she.

Accordingto the latest statistics given out by UNAIDS and WHO, there are closeto 39.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the world and though itwill be a while before an imminent cure is likely, Dr Indrani Sarkar'sfindings certainly hold out hope for the millions who are battling thedisease across the globe.