Potential AIDS Cure: Has Australian Scientist Ended World's Deadliest Disease?

A cure for AIDS could be coming sooner rather than later.

According to Cosmos Magazine, David Harrich, from the Queensland, Australia, Institute of Medical Research said he has modified a protein in HIV that normally helps the virus spread, into a "potent" inhibitor.

"I have never seen anything like it. The modified protein works every time," said Harrich to the magazine.

Harrich came across this possible cure by introducing a protein into the immune cells infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Once implanted, the protein slowed the reproduction of the virus.

"The modified protein dubbed Nullbasic inhibited virus replications about eight-to-ten-fold in some cells-we're looking at a cure for AIDS," said Harrich in his and his team's study, which is published in the journal Human Gene Therapy.

This could be the breakthrough to trump all breakthroughs, the cure to surpass all other cures, but Frank Wegmann, an Oxford University HIV vaccine researcher has a wakeup.

"The immune cells of the blood are the primary cells which are infected by HIV and if you want to have a cure with this new protein, you need to ... get every immune cell to make this protein," he explained.

The only option would be gene therapy, which is a complicated, rare, potentially dangerous and expensive.

"They [the Australian researchers] have partly addressed that question. They have partly tested that [gene therapy], but not really in patients or in infected people, only in the lab," Wegmann added.

But, Harrich responded to Wegmann by stating that "Tthe virus might infect a cell but it wouldn't spread. You would still be infected with HIV, it's not a cure for the virus, but the virus would stay latent, it wouldn't wake up, so it wouldn't develop into AIDS. With a treatment like this, you would maintain a healthy immune system."

This gives hope to people already infected with the decease, but, even if proven to work wouldn't be available for 10 years or so.

Using a single-protein treatment could mean and end to multiple drug regimens for HIV patients, resulting in a better quality of life and a cheaper expense.

According to the U.N. the number of people infected with HIV worldwide rose to 34 million in 2011, a million person increases from 2010.

However, the U.N. did report a decrease in the worldwide AIDS-related death toll-1.7 million-a 24 percent fewer than in 2005 and nearly six percent below the 2010 level.

Though the experiments for this "cure" were done in a lab dish, before it can be considered a true cure, lab animal testing and human trial is required.

Animal trials are scheduled to start sometime this year.