Bitter melon: the source of the next promising HIV drug?

In the 1980s, almost everything great is great. Big and outrageously baggy clothes. Huge and rare hairstyles. Monster cassette players with thunderous speakers blasting Hip Hop basses at full volume. It was the perfect time to come of age for most teenagers.

However, there was one big thing in particular that wasn’t right for some kids in the ’80s: HIV.

Back then, HIV was considered a new kind of devastating plague. Contracting HIV in the 1980s meant outright condemnation and needless abhorrence on the part of society. There were times during the early 1980s when medical technicians donned spacesuit-like protective gear to whisk patients suffering from serious opportunistic infections out of their homes. And the worst thing was that there was practically no treatment for HIV/AIDS at that time.

One can imagine the severe physical, mental, and social anguish an HIV positive person went through in the 1980s. Fortunately, years of scientific research have paid off and many drugs have been developed to treat HIV. One of these medications is antiretrovirals or ARVs. Introduced in 1996, ARVs are perhaps the most common HIV drugs today. ARVs have really helped improve the quality of life for people infected with HIV.

But there is a setback: ARVs are expensive. Some HIV-positive patients, particularly those living in impoverished countries, are unable to obtain ARVs and continue to suffer greatly from the onslaught of AIDS. That’s why scientists and patients alike have embarked on a quest to discover a less expensive treatment for HIV/AIDS. One of the most promising alternative treatments for HIV/AIDS is the exotic tropical vegetable bitter melon.

bitter melon (momordica charity) is a vine native to tropical Asia. For centuries, Asians have been using its fruits, leaves, and seeds to relieve a variety of ailments, including constipation, dyspepsia, malaria, and diabetes. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic spread to Asia in the 1980s, many infected people turned to bitter melon to reverse the trend of regressing immune functions.

the potential of momordica charity as HIV treatment received a popular boost when the case of Filipino-American Stanley Rebultan was widely reported in the press. Rebultan was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987. However, he did not take any medication for several months as his T-cell counts were normal. After a while, Rebultan became alarmed that his T-cell levels were dropping drastically. He asked his doctor if he could take AZT, which was the most popular HIV drug at the time, but his doctor was unfamiliar with the drug and told him not to take it.

At that time, Rebultan visited his family in the Philippines and was told by a friend that bitter melon, a well-known local vegetable, is effective in treating leukemia. He toyed with the naive theory that bitter melon can work on HIV, as he thought it is also a blood disease like leukemia. So he started drinking bitter melon liquid regularly and was surprised that his T-cell levels increased dramatically.

After the miraculous story of Rebultan came to light, Dr. Quincai Zhange, a Chinese scientist, published a study stating that HIV-positive patients who took bitter melon for a period of four months had significantly higher T-cell ratios. normalized. In Zhang’s study, something in bitter melon was found to have the ability to inhibit HIV. Subsequent studies have found that these HIV-inhibiting compounds in bitter melon are the proteins AP 30 and momorcharain.

Further experiments are still underway to clinically validate the efficacy of HIV-inhibiting compounds in momordica charity. But the potential of bitter melon to treat HIV remains immense.