Found: A cure for HIV

Found: A cure for HIV

In a pathbreaking, documented work, doctors have functionally cured a child in the US of HIV infection. But is it too early to pin hopes on a way to kill the virus?

Hitting early, hard The baby is born in a rural hospital in Mississippi, US. Mother had just tested positive for HIV. Within 30 hours of birth, baby is put on a cocktail of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs — zidovudine, lamivudine, and nevirapine — instead of a single dosage; nothing invasive Drop in count Viral load begins to go down after a week and was eventually undetectable; ART is continued for 18 months Roadblock Mother goes AWOL with the child for about five months; medication is, therefore, stopped Miracle child When the child is brought back at the age of 2, doctors assume the virus, which lies dormant in hard-to-treat pools of cells called viral reservoirs during an aggressive ART treatment, had resurfaced But a battery of tests proves otherwise. Child is declared ‘functionally cured’, rather than completely cured. That is because the virus is not totally eradicated; its presence is reduced to such a low level that a body can control it without the need for standard drug treatment Now 21/2 years old, the child has been off drugs for a year with no sign of functioning virus The precursor In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown, aka ‘the Berlin patient’, was the first person reported to have recovered from HIV. His immune system was destroyed as part of a treatment for leukaemia. It was then restored with a stem-cell transplant from a woman naturally-resistant to HIV Can we beat HIV, every time? The US case was peculiar. Doctors were able to hit the virus hard and early. This is not possible in adults, who will acquire HIV months — if not years — before they find out. But, for sure, this approach is not going to provide a cure for the vast majority of HIV patients Will it work on older kids? More testing is needed to see if it will have the same effect on other children. The doctors who studied the girl believe that she was cured because the treatment was so potent and given swiftly after birth. It will not work on older children because the virus would have already infected their cells