HIV may be losing its ability to progress into full-blown AIDS, according to new research, which found that widespread use of antiretroviral drugs may be hampering the virus's power to replicate.
Researchers from the University of Oxford led an international team of scientists, including Canadians, who studied more than 2,000 HIV-positive women in Botswana and South Africa.
They broke their study into two parts.
The first part looked at whether the interaction between the body's own immune system and HIV can slow the virus's ability to replicate, which means that it becomes less harmful.
In the patients from Botswana, the researchers found that they had lost the protective effect of a protein called HLA-B*57, which makes HIV progress more slowly to AIDS. In Botswana, HIV has evolved to adapt to this protein more than it has in South Africa.
But the good news is that the virus's adaptation to the protein appears to have come at the expense of the virus's ability to replicate, making it less virulent.
Therefore, the researchers say, HIV's adaptation to a protective gene is actually making it less powerful, which could contribute to the ultimate elimination of the virus.
The second part of the study found that in some patients, treatment with antiretroviral therapy actually encourages the evolution of HIV variants that don't replicate as easily as others.
"This research highlights the fact that HIV adaptation to the most effective immune responses we can make against it comes at a significant cost to its ability to replicate," lead researcher Phillip Goulder said in a statement.
"Anything we can do to increase the pressure on HIV in this way may allow scientists to reduce the destructive power of HIV over time."
The findings are published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study was released on Monday, which marked World AIDS Day.
According to the World Health Organization, there were 35 million people living with HIV around the world in 2013.
