Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that drugs, used to treat one deadly disease, may actually help to fight off another.

After 20 years of researching HIV, Professor Louis Mansky is hoping his latest research will lead to a new treatment. He says, "We can count all the cells that have been infected."

His team recently found a way to treat the virus, using drugs already on the market.

Drugs, Decitabine and Gemcitabine, are currently used to treat cancer. But when combined in lab experiments, researchers wanted them to do something else for HIV. Steve Patterson, a researcher says, "To force the virus to mutate at a much higher rate and kill itself off."

They say that's exactly what happened. Prof. Mansky says, "Together, in combination, at concentrations or at doses much lower than what's used for cancer chemotherapy, these things work in our models very, very well."

The beauty of this is that the drugs are already approved by the FDA, saving them lots of time and money. Prof. Mansky says, "The hope is that these drugs can be, um, uh, more quickly developed into new anti-HIV drugs."

Of course, plenty more research needs to be done, including clinical trials in humans. And they also hope to put the drugs in pill form. Right now, they're only given through an IV. But for now, they're quite optimistic about the discovery.

Prof. Mansky adds, "We hope that we'll be able to translate this into some effective therapy."

These researchers have studied the cancer drugs in mice and also found positive results, but it will take some time before they can test people. One big question will be whether the drugs have any long-term side effects on patients.