Statins like these help millions of heart patients

It turns out that the virus may need patches of cholesterol on the surface of the cell in order to make this happen.

Research published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday found that removing cholesterol from cells in a test tube might be able to severely inhibit the action of HIV.

The drug has yet to be tried out on HIV patients in a full clinical trial.

Our research raises the intriguing possibility that widely used cholesterol lowering drugs might have an effect in humans similar to what we have found in these initial laboratory studies

Dr Eric Freed, researcher

The researchers, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, looked in detail at how the viruses negotiated the double-walled outer skin of the human cell.

Scientists already know that, to enter a cell successfully, a chemical component of HIV, called Gag, must attach to the membrane.

The team found that Gag attached itself to areas on the membrane rich in cholesterol, nicknamed "rafts".

Once the HIV has found its way through the membrane, it can replicate and exit to infect other cells.

Cholesterol halted

If it cannot get in, its ability to reproduce and spread is severely curtailed.

The US team is now looking for ways to use this information to block HIV and Gag.

In the laboratory, they used compounds, one of which removes cholesterol from the cell surface, and another which stops cholesterol from being produced in the first place.

Used individually, both significantly reduced HIV's ability to form particles which could infect new cells.

However, when used together, HIV was almost entirely unable to replicate.

Dr Eric Freed, the senior author of the research, said: "Our research raises the intriguing possibility that widely used cholesterol lowering drugs might have an effect in humans similar to what we have found in these initial laboratory studies.

"Additional experiments are needed to determine whether this interaction can be interrupted therapeutically to treat HIV-infected people."