What does that mean? (mRNA encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticle entering cells is exactly how the COVID vaccines of BioNTech and Moderna work)

  It was “previously thought impossible” to deliver mRNA to the type of white
  blood cell that is home to HIV, said Dr Paula Cevaal, research fellow at the
  Doherty Institute and co-first author of the study, because those cells did
  not take up the fat bubbles, or lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), used to carry it.

  The team have developed a new type of LNP that those cells will accept, known
  as LNP X. She said: “Our hope is that this new nanoparticle design could be a
  new pathway to an HIV cure.”

Herpesvirus latency is really complicated, more so than HIV. It hides in more tissues and particularly in nerves, which have some degree (debated) of immune privilege. Every type has different latency. Most types have multiple, very different methods of staying latent and stay more latent than HIV. We understand some of those methods, partially understand many of them, and still don't know a lot about others. A latent infection will probably still remain if too few of these pathways are activated at once.

> We therefore modified the lipid composition of the LNP to enhance potency. First, the ionisable lipid DLin-MC3-DMA (MC3) was replaced with SM-102, an ionisable lipid previously shown to lead to greater cytosolic mRNA delivery through enhanced endosomal escape [30]. Second, the SM-102-LNPs were further modified using ß-sitosterol, a naturally-occurring cholesterol analogue associated with enhanced mRNA delivery [31], to create a formulation referred to as LNP X (Fig. 1b).

[30]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29653760/

[31]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32080183/

Neither of those papers they cited were focused on HIV/T cells specifically. Maybe this will have no applications, or applications in HIV only, or be generally useful for hard to transfect cells, or be bad for HIV for some unforseen reason but useful elsewhere, or be a dead end, you never know. But yeah maybe if folks run into similar challenges for approaches to dealing with those viruses, maybe there's something from this work that could help them, who knows?

Maybe BigCo Evil Pharma isn't "incentivized" to cure HIV; but hundreds of universities including those outside the United States, are. The US does not hold a monopoly on medical advancement.

HIV is *hard* to cure. That's why it's not been cured yet.

This is sad…