HIV can be beaten back by a growing wealth of effective drugs. But it has proven to be a tough survivor, finding a way to hide in patients’ tissue from the attempts to eradicate it.

But a drug typically used to treat alcoholism could be the “game changer” to flush it out, according to a group of international researchers.

Disulfiram activated HIV in 30 HIV-positive patients over three-day trials in Melbourne and San Francisco, according to the study published this week in the The Lancet HIV.

“This trial clearly demonstrates that disulfiram is not toxic and is safe to use, and could be the ‘game changer’ we need,” said Sharon Lewin, a professor at the University of Melbourne, and leader of the experiments. “The dosage of disulfiram we used provided more of a ‘tickle’ than a ‘kick’ to the virus, but this could be enough. Even though the drug was only given for three days, we saw a clear increase in virus in plasma, which was very encouraging.”

Despite calls for a strong drug response to shock the virus out of its hidden state, a more-gentle approach might be best for the overall health of the patients, said Steven Deeks, of the University of California San Francisco, who collaborated on the trials.

[pullquote]The potential for disulfiram’s activation of dormant HIV was first recognized by a U.S. team led by Johns Hopkins scientists in 2011.[/pullquote]

“Most groups are seeking for a powerful weapon to shock the virus out of its hiding place. These approaches may prove to be harmful,” Deeks said. “I see disulfiram as a more gentle way to accomplish this same goal, particularly if we can show it works when given over a long period of time.”

The potential for disulfiram’s activation of dormant HIV was first recognized by a U.S. team led by Johns Hopkins scientists in 2011.

Twenty years of innovation have brought the virus under some measure of control. AZT was the first HIV drug, approved in 1987. Further waves of protease inhibitors in the 1990s and fusion inhibitors in the early 2000s gave doctors and patients more treatments to potentially battle back against the retrovirus.

The most recent advances have been a potential vaccine unveiled last month which will be undergoing human trials, and bimonthly drug cocktail injections which appear to be just as effective in managing the disease.

HIV continues to be a worldwide epidemic. An estimated 75 million people have been diagnosed with the disease since it was identified in the 1980s, and some 35 million are currently living and trying to manage the virus today, according to the World Health Organization. An additional 2.5 million people are infected annually, according to those estimates.