We’re not a health technology blog here at SiliconANGLE, but about once every month or two, a piece of tech from the health business comes along that’s so advanced and utterly cool that it’d be irresponsible not to pass it along.

Casey Kazan at The Daily Galaxy translated into plain English some truly remarkable and bizarre medical research that asserts that AIDS and HIV can be stopped through the use of latent defenses in the human body by the simple application of a cream.

Cyclic theta defensins might sound something a science fiction writer would say after a blow to the head, but they’re a particular form of these useful compounds, called "cyclic" because the peptide chain that forms their backbone is actually circular.

These defensins bond to HIV retroviruses to prevent them from entering cells – and a virus which can’t get into cells is just a scrap of amino acids waiting to be destroyed.  This incredibly useful anti-AIDS immune equipment was first found in monkeys, but a joint team of scientists from the Universities of Central Florida, California, and the Center for Disease Control (who are kind of into this sort of thing) found the genetic code for their construction in humans.

The team have experimentally reactivated the code in the lab and shown that the brand new human-made theta-defensins (back on tour after a few million years vacation!) are as effective against HIV as ever, preventing any entry into potential host cells.  Even better, they say in the future the code could be reactivated in cervicovaginal tissues by the application of a cream.

To further translate that into plain English, humans have an ability to easily defeat HIV/AIDS that has been turned off and passed down genetically for ages. In experiments on monkeys, this ability has been shown to be turned back on through the application of a cream.

There’s an incredibly complex and incomprehensible academic paper on the process I hunted down on the topic (beware, PDF link: “Pharmacological Suppression of Premature Stop Mutations that Cause Genetic Diseases”), and an academic paper on the use of this technology as applied to fighting HIV-1 (html on this on: “Reawakening Retrocyclins: Ancestral Human Defensins Active Against HIV-1”).

I can’t speak authoritatively on the medical issues at stake, but I can speak to the incredible wonder I have to live at a time when these sort of technological leaps happen all around us so often as to become almost passé.