HIV Cure! Scientists Make Remarkable Breakthrough!

UK scientists 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 showedd 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.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/02/
scientists-testing-cure-for-hiv-report-progress?
CMP=twt_gu