This is awesome news. I must admit to being a wee bit of a geek about cell workings. My favorite part of science class was drawing cell diagrams and I love finding out about the awesome things our cells can do. (Yes I am a dork, shut up).

A few years ago (in a botany class of all places. I have the world’s largest black thumb but for some reason I thought botany would be like a romantic Merchant ivory film where we spent hours drawing pretty pictures of plants and their parts. Instead we had to ACTUALLY GROW THINGS! I can’t do that.) I saw a film about how cancer and HIV are the flip sides of the same coin. Normal, healthy cells will kill themselves when they’ve outlived their usefulness. This is called Programed Cell Death. In cancer, the suicide mechanism gets shut off and the cells that should be dead build up into tumors. In HIV, cells that are healthy commit suicide for no reason. So it makes total sense that cancer and HIV research has a lot in common.

But HIV is a smart virus. It adapts so that drug therapy becomes less effective and it acts a bit like a cancer when it gets into microphage cells, making them live much longer than they are supposed too rather than killing them off so that there is always a residual pool of HIV in the body.

So along comes the drug miltefosine, which is already used to treat leishmaniasis, an parasite infection caused by sandfly bites. Miltefosine kills microphage cells and may work to deplete residual HIV pools. Because miltefosine is already approved for use in humans, testing can be fast tracked to see if it will work in HIV patients. Yay!