Three antibodies that attack 99 percent of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) have been developed by researchers, according to Independent News. Normally, drugs prevent the virus to leave its dormant state. Once someone with HIV stops using medications, the virus can emerge and weaken the host’s immune system. This also increases the risk of an infected person passing the virus to someone else.

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This new antibody, which would use a “kick and kill” technique, is designed to eliminate the reservoirs in the body where HIV hides out. Killing these cells held in reservoirs could kill most or all of the virus.

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The virus hurts its host by making the immune system attack itself, therefore making the host less able to fight off infections and diseases. For the virus becomes concentrated in one part of the immune system, and then a smaller part becomes dormant somewhere else in the immune system, hidden and away from the first part. By the time the infected cells are found, the virus has already spread to other cells.

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Going from there, the previous treatment worked by eliminating the concentrated part, but there was not a solution on how to deal with the dormant part that makes the virus come back. Up until now, the treatment simply killed the virus when it spiked.

The problem with the dormant part of the virus is that it kept getting away. The cure works by locking the HIV virus into the infected cell. This stops the virus from spreading, and in doing so, makes the virus vulnerable.

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This potential cure has not been widely tested yet. While it worked in all lab experiments, it hasn’t yet been tested on the general public. So far it has been tested on 24 monkeys, and none of them developed HIV afterwards.

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According to the United Nations website on AIDs, approximately 36.7 million people were living with HIV in 2017 worldwide. Of those, 1.8 million were new cases in 2016. Since the beginning of the epidemic, about 76.1 million people have become infected with HIV. Globally the number of new HIV infections has decreased since the turn of the century. More education and the introduction of HIV preventatives have helped to decrease the spread of the virus. If researchers are able to make the antibody cure work in humans, there could possibly be an end to the HIV epidemic.