Researchers hoping to find an Achilles' Heel to attack the HIV virus say they may have identified one in the virus' "sweet tooth," a voracious appetite for sugar.

After invading an immune cell in the human body, the virus needs sugar and other nutrients from within the cell to use as fuel, so it hijacks the cell's glucose factory and supply to create millions of copies of itself and invade other cells, they say.

"It's a monster that invades the cell and says 'feed me!'" says study author Harry Taylor, research assistant professor in medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "It usurps the entire production line."

Knowledge of how it does that may open one avenue to attack the virus, say researchers at Northwestern and Vanderbilt University who have identified the switch that opens up the rich sugar and nutrient pipeline within an immune cell.

They've developed an experimental compound that blocks that pipeline and starves the HIV to death, they report in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

In addition to suggesting a way to combat HIV, the finding may also have implications for successful treatments of cancer, since cancer cells have a similar voracious appetite for sugar and nutrients, which they also require to grow and multiply.

Current efforts to combat HIV are made difficult because the virus is constantly mutating,

"A drug targeting HIV that works today may be less effective a few years down the road, because HIV can mutate itself to evade the drug," Taylor says.

The results of the new study may improve the effectiveness of HIV drugs currently existing or under development, he says.

"This compound can be the precursor for something that can be used in the future as part of a cocktail to treat HIV that improves on the effective medicines we have today," Taylor notes.

The researchers found that the first step in blocking HIV's access to the immune cells' sugar and nutrient "pantry" involved activating a cell component called phospholipase D1 (PLD1) then using their experimental compound to block PLD1 and close down the pipeline.

Similar compounds were investigated in the 1990s but the drugs they produced had serious side effects in HIV patients and often killed healthy cells as well as ones infected with HIV.

The researchers say the new compound presents a "gentler, non-toxic" way to deny HIV its needed nutrients.