Danish researchers have made a significant breakthrough that will drastically speed up the process of developing new medicine to treat AIDS patients. 

The ever-evolving HIV virus eventually becomes resistant to nearly all treatments, but now a team from the University of Southern Denmark have developed an effective computer-based model that can identify chemical compounds that can treat AIDS – in weeks, not years.

The discovery could prolong the lives of millions of patients. 

Fast, accurate and promising
"Our work shows that computer-based analysis is an extremely fast, accurate and promising method when it comes to developing new drugs," Vasanthanathan Poongavanam, a postdoc at the Department of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Southern Denmark, told sdu.dk. 

Poongavanam, together with his colleague Jacob Kongsted, managed to screen half a million chemical compounds in just a few weeks.

They identified 14 that were able to stop the virus's ability to reproduce and these chemical compounds have since been sent to a team of Italian researchers at the University of Cagliari.