This month, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have released a report showing that the drug minocycline, commonly used as an acne treatment, is also quite effective against latent HIV-infected T cells (type of white blood cell).

One reason HIV remains such a medical challenge is because the virus is capable of infecting two groups of cells: active, growing T cells, and resting T cells.

Infection of active T cells leads to extensive viral replication and proliferation of the disease. The current highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) regimen acts on these quickly replicating viruses.

Meanwhile, in the inactive infected T cells, the HIV virus lies dormant, or latent. Here it can lie hidden and reactivate at an opportune time, such as when a patient stops treatment or misses a dose.

This latency is where minocycline has been found to succeed where other drugs fall short. Instead of targeting the virus itself like the current HAART drugs, minocycline inhibits growth of T cells. This prevents latent HIV-infected T cells from reactivating and replicating.

By putting a stop to virus activation, minocycline interferes with a step crucial to the virus’ production and progression towards AIDS. Thus it has the potential to make a valuable addition to HAART.

“Minocycline reduces the capability of the virus to emerge from resting infected T cells,” said Gregory Szeto, a graduate student working in the Retrovirus Laboratory at Hopkins.

“It prevents the virus from escaping in the one in a million cells in which it lays dormant in a person on HAART, and since it prevents virus activation it should maintain the level of viral latency or even lower it. That’s the goal: Sustaining a latent non-infectious state.”

And the effectiveness of minocycline isn’t the only benefit of this study.

Janice Clements, lead researcher and professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, states that “our new understanding about minocyline’s effects on a T cell could help us to find even more drugs that target its signaling pathways.”

For more information, please see the article published in the Journal of Infectious Disease, or the Johns Hopkins press release.