A common prescription drug that is used for the treatment of nail fungus (of all things), has been scientifically proven and tested to have a side-effect that could benefit mankind: It kills the HIV virus.

Ciclopirox, a topical cream applied to foot and nail fungi, has been tested to successfully eliminate the infection of HIV from cell cultures. When the drug is stopped, the virus cannot recover, hence proving Ciclopirox is 100% successful in killing HIV.

A group of researchers from the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School has also proven that the foot cream "inhibits the expression of HIV genes in the culture." They have also discovered that it blocks out the efficacy of the mitochondria, which causes the "bad" cells to-in a manner of speaking-kill themselves, while keeping the healthy cells safe and intact.

One of the most particular problems that makes HIV as deadly as it is, is that it disables the cell's ability to self-destruct after being infected or damaged, even despite being countered with antiviral treatments. This means that HIV prevents the sick cells to sacrifice themselves so that the other cells may live. What Ciclopirox does is to disable what disables the sick cells' kamikaze missions.

"The key thing these drugs do is, unlike anti-retrovirals in the current clinical arsenal, and there are lots of them and they have controlled this disease pretty successfully, these drugs kill the HIV-infected cell," says Michael Matthews, the team's lead researcher and chair of the school's department of biochemistry and molecular biology related excitedly. "That's what's so new and so promising about it."

However, Dr. Robert Gallo, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland (who was partially responsible for discovering HIV in 1984) said that despite how successful the foot cream is with killing HIV cells, it's still not going to work, explaining that a foot cream is only topical hence preventive, and the only way for it to be used as a therapy was for it to be systematically applied.

Members of the Rutgers team say that while Ciclopirox is currently more known as a topical foot cream, there could come a time in the near future that it will no longer be defined as only a topical cream, and be engineered to be used as a systematic drug.

The team has yet to perform clinical trials in humans to see if it is safe and effective as treatment for HIV, but point out that since it is already FDA-approved and safe for use for humans, could hasten the regulatory process.