HIV Cure Finally Here? Scientists Looking For Cure Make Remarkable Breakthrough

Scientists in the United Kingdom and clinicians
working on a groundbreaking trial to test a
possible cure for HIV infection say they have
made remarkable progress after a test patient
showed no sign of the virus following treatment.
The research, being carried out by five of Britain’s
top universities with NHS support, is combining
standard antiretroviral drugs with a drug that
reactivates dormant HIV and a vaccine that
induces the immune system to destroy the
infected cells.
Antiretoviral drugs alone are highly effective at
stopping the virus from reproducing but do not
eradicate the disease, so must be taken for life.
Fifty patients are taking part in the trial and early
tests on the first person to complete the
treatment show no signs of the virus in his blood,
the Sunday Times reported.
There is still a long way to go before the
treatment can be deemed a success as the virus
has previously re-emerged in people thought to
have been “cured” and the use of antiretroviral
drugs means the researchers cannot be sure the
HIV has gone. Nevertheless there is optimism
over the findings.
Mark Samuels, the managing director of the
National Institute for Health Research Office for
Clinical Research Infrastructure, told the Sunday
Times: “This is one of the first serious attempts
at a full cure for HIV. We are exploring the real
possibility of curing HIV. This is a huge challenge
and it’s still early days but the progress has been
remarkable.”
HIV is able to hide itself from the immune system
in dormant cells where highly sophisticated
modern testing cannot find it and therefore resist
therapy. The treatment endeavours to trick the
virus into emerging from its hiding places and
then trigger the body’s immune system to
recognise it and attack it, an approach that has
been called “kick and kill”.
There are approximately 37 million people living
with HIV worldwide and about 35 million people
have died from the virus.
The difficulty of declaring a patient clear of HIV
was illustrated by the case of a girl in Mississippi,
who was put on a strong course of antiretroviral
drugs within 30 hours of her birth in 2010 after
her mother was found to be HIV positive.
Treatment continued until the hospital lost
contact with the mother 18 months later. When
mother and child reappeared five months later the
baby had no detectable virus in her blood, raising
hopes that early intervention had cured her, but
two years the virus had re-emerged.
The only person believed to have been cured was
Timothy Ray Brown, an American treated in
Germany. He needed a bone marrow transplant to
replace his own cancerous cells with stem cells
that would remake his immune system and his
doctor found him a donor who was naturally
resistant to HIV infection due to a genetic
mutation that blocks HIV from entering the cells in
the human body.
However, stem cell transplants are difficult and
potentially dangerous for the recipient and only
undertaken where they can save a life.
Source: GUARDIAN