Indian doc develops enzyme that can destroy HIV

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.

印度医学博士研制出可以消灭艾滋病毒的酶

译者注：Digg上看到的...

爆炸性消息：Indrani Sarkar博士有充分的理由感到激动万分。她于2002年开始在德国德累斯顿Max Planck学院撰写的博士论文，为研制消灭永久影响人类细胞的HIV（人类免疫缺陷病毒，即艾滋病毒）的酶，开启了一扇大门。

Indrani和一组科学家已经研制了一种被称为Tre的酶。Tre是一种定制的酶，有探测、识别并消灭HIV的能力，就像是一把分子剪刀。

“以外行人的话说，这是一种被控制的酶，它可以识别出复制的HIV基因组序列，和病毒合并，然后在基因重组的过程中，把病毒从原来的基因组中切除掉”，她这样描述道。

在今天，对付HIV最大的挑战就是它潜伏期很长，并且对治疗HIV的药物产生抗药性。

唯一能够治疗HIV的方法就是完全消灭病毒。这种Indrani花费了一年时间构建的Tre酶以及它的126个变种，在实验室条件下，用了三个月，最后完全把HIV从人类基因中清理干净了。

“这是一个漂亮的方法，但是就像其他药物，这个也要几年后才能被用作临床——事实上，是5年到20年之间。还有很多研究需要完成，因为现在只是研制出了这种新的酶，但要大量制造它就是另外一回事了”，她这样说道。

根据联合国艾滋病规划署以及世界卫生组织的最新统计数据，世界上有接近四千万的艾滋病毒携带者。尽管现在离使用进行实际治疗还有一段时间，Indrani Sarkar博士的发现无疑会给世界上成百上千万和病魔搏斗着的人们带来希望。