Month: April 2015

HIV spreads like internet malware and should be treated earlier – UCL News – Published on: 2 Apr 2015

The reason we call nasty computer programmes ‘viruses’ is because their behaviour mimics the real thing – spread between individuals, make more copies of yourself and repeat. So it’s kind of glorious that we can flip this around and learn about the viruses that make us sick by studying their digital analogues.

Here a team from London, Oxford and Changsha (in China) looked at the role of ‘hybrid spreading’ – a phenomenon shared by HIV infection and computer malware such as the Conficker worm. These viruses both spread over long-distances (bloodstream / the internet) and between close contacts (between cells / between computers on a local network). And both are also extremely difficult to get rid of once the infection is fully established because local ‘pockets’ of virus can be difficult to eliminate¹.

The computer model the research team have developed suggests that to combat HIV infection in people, we need treatments that work effectively against both means of spread, and we need to treat earlier than we currently do. The team’s model may also provide a way of testing whether drugs are effective at stopping cell-to-cell spread; a measurement that is otherwise difficult to study.