German scientists have won an important battle in the war on Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) by eliminating the virus that can lead to Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (Aids) from human cells for the first time.
The so-called "DNA surgery" procedure is in its early stages - animal testing has yet to begin - but the treatment holds out hope of eliminating rather than suppressing the virus as present treatments do.
"Until now we have just managed to hold the virus in check," said Dr Joachim Hauber, researcher at the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg. "But we have really managed to wipe it out."
The scientist and his team cleared a human connective tissue cell of HIV with an enzyme that recognises and recombines the DNA of the virus.
They hope to expand on this enzyme treatment and reverse the infection process by throwing the HI-virus out of cells it has entered.
HIV is a retrovirus that nests in the DNA or key genetic material of infected cells and forces them to continue generating further infected cells.
Existing drug therapies merely hammer away at the infected cells reproduced in the body by infected DNA - the scientific equivalent of slicing the heads off weeds.
The German procedure uses a modified human enzyme, generated over two years of work, that can spot the characteristic HIV sequence in DNA and pull it out by the roots.
Over 10 weeks, the scientists watched as the enzyme worked on the DNA, slicing out the HIV sequence and flushing it away as waste.
"After that the cell is healthy," said Dr Hauber. Three years of experiments on mice are planned next, and if all goes according to plan, will be followed by tests on humans.
He said it was his "cautious" hope that a cure for Aids could be found within 10 years.
The treatment would not be a case of popping a pill: it would require the laboratory treatment of a patient's blood which is then reinjected into the infected person.
While this is indeed a very promising line of research, much work remains to be done to make this an effective treatment for HIV.
Dr Indrani Sarkar of Dresden's Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, who co-authored the study, warned that the team had yet to establish that the enzyme had no adverse effects on humans.
"Nevertheless, the results we present offer an early proof of principal for this type of approach, which we speculate might form a useful basis for the development of future HIV therapies," said Dr Sarkar.