Nebraska Researcher: Yogurt Bacteria Could Cure HIV Someday

Haspula · August 6, 2013

A Nebraskan is infected with HIV every three days; nationally, it’s every 11 minutes. A vaccine for the virus will be tricky to come by, if it’s possible at all. But a researcher from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is looking into a method of prevention that would be easy, cheap and long-term – and that relies on a feature of a common grocery item.

On a recent, crisp winter day at a Lincoln grocery store, shoppers perused dozens of different kinds of yogurt: harvest peach, strawberry, Greek, Greek strawberry … the list goes on and on. Yogurt’s a healthy snack for numerous reasons; it’s high in calcium, protein, magnesium and potassium, to name a few. And if a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor’s research goes the way he hopes, yogurt could one day also keep you safe from HIV.

It’s part of the research being conducted by Dr. Shi-hua Xiang, professor with the Virology Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. But to understand how novel his approach is – and the potential it holds, if it proves successful – we need a bit of background first.

That’s where that grocery store yogurt comes in. Among the nutrients mentioned earlier in the story, it’s also a great source of lactobacillus, or that “good bacteria” touted all over the packaging. That’s what Xiang is focusing his research on: he’s testing a genetically modified version of the bacteria that would essentially act as a decoy, tricking the HIV virus into attacking. But instead of letting the virus then pass into and infect the body, the bacteria trap it.

“So you can actually neutralize the HIV virus,” he explained. The bacteria, which has a fairly short shelf-life, then naturally passes from the body, taking the HIV virus with it.

The modified lactobacillus could be introduced to the body in several different ways, Xiang theorized – including, perhaps, a spoonful of yogurt. The idea is that the modified bacteria would then replicate themselves in the areas where their counterparts already exists – the mouth, the vagina, the rectum – which are also the main points of entry for the HIV virus.