As humanity, we have been exposed to countless global and local, deadly and contagious diseases throughout history, and no matter how much we tried to take precautions against these diseases with pandemics and different clothes that reduce contagion, we could not prevent mass deaths, until science developed and a medicine or vaccine was produced against this disease. For example, smallpox, which caused the death of approximately 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence, and rinderpest in ruminant animals have been successfully eradicated, that is, completely erased from the face of the Earth thanks to the scientific and medical developments made towards these diseases. This means that no person can die due to these diseases anymore. However, of course, there are still a lot of deadly diseases which have no cure for now.
Today, I will talk about a drug that can end AIDS, which has caused the death of 42 million people in the world so far and has caused 630.000 deaths in 2023, for which there is no known cure today. Imagine a drug that Science, one of the world’s most famous science magazines, named as the number 1 invention of the year. The name of this drug is lenacapavir.
Before giving an information about the drug, it is necessary to make a brief explanation about AIDS and HIV. AIDS is the abbreviation of ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’ and HIV stands for ‘Human Immunodeficiency Virus’. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. When HIV enters body, the immune system of the patient get attacked and weakened by the virus which paves the way through life-threatining infections and cancers, and may result in the death of the patient. Since immune system has an important role on survival of human body, the people would be more open and vulnerable through risky diseases.
The newly developed drug lenacapavir binds to the outer sheath of HIV, which causes AIDS, and prevents this virus from entering the human body for 6 months. Thus, we can say that the first functional HIV vaccine in history was found, invented. Who knows, maybe in 10 years from now, there wouldn’t be any case according to HIV and AIDS and AIDS-related deaths can be relegated to the dusty shelves of history. In this way, perhaps in the future, humanity will be able to completely eradicate another disease from the face of the earth, just like smallpox. Of course, the complete eradication of a disease is not possible without the cooperation and solidarity of the whole world.