Leor Weinberger calls it hijacking the hijacker. In his lab at
the Gladstone
Institutes, he's developed a technique for harnessing stray bits of HIV - a
virus that infects and ultimately kills immune cells - and using them to attack
the virus itself.
His work, still
preliminary and untested in animals or humans, is part of what some scientists
are calling a "renaissance" in viral therapy. Giant advances in our
understanding of how viruses work and how they can be manipulated have led to a
growing field of research in using them to fight some of the world's deadliest diseases.
"We're
building a therapy for HIV, because that's what we are experts in, but we
believe this is not just HIV-specific," said Weinberger, an associate
investigator at Gladstone.
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