Searching for a cure for HIV

According to recent press release by a hospital in Mississippi, US, a baby girl has been “functionally cured” of HIV, changing her life forever, by avoiding a lifetime of medication, and worries about the disease.

The girl in question was treated very early and hard, with the use of standard drug therapy, and has now been off medication for over a year with no signs of infection. The baby was given a cocktail of widely available drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy, which is already used in infants to treat HIV. This new discovery suggests that HIV can be potentially treated before it can form hideouts in the body. These so-called reservoirs typically re-infect the individual once the medication is stopped.

The baby caught the virus from her mother, who did not receive any prenatal HIV treatment thereby increasing the risk of the baby being infected. Once she tested positive, the baby was transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where she was put on three separate, standard HIV fighting drugs, at just 30 hours old. The treatment was continued for 18 months, at which point the child disappeared from the medical system. Five months later, when the mother and child turned up again, doctors tested the baby and found the virus had not returned in the baby, despite not having received treatment in the interim.

Dr Rowena Johnston, of the Foundation for Aids Research, said it appeared that the early intervention that started immediately after birth worked. "Many doctors in six different laboratories all applied different, very sophisticated tests trying to find HIV in this infant and nobody was able to find any. And so we really can quite confidently conclude at this point that the child does very much appear to be cured."

HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus and on its own does not kill any individual. However the virus can survive and grow only infecting and destroying the immune system. This continual assault causes the immune system to get weaker and weaker until it is no longer able to protect the body against any infections. Without treatment, it takes about 10 years for the infection to develop in to AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). It is then the regular infections, which a healthy immune system could fight off, that become deadly and people can die from pneumonias, brain infections, diarrheal illness and certain tumors.

Nonetheless more testing needs to be done to see if the treatment, if given within hours of birth, could work for others. While the findings are encouraging, it remains to be seen, whether the treatment will provide permanent remission. Experts also say that the same treatment would not work in older children and adults, as the virus will be too well established. After HIV first infects the patient, the virus spreads rapidly, infecting cells all over the body.

Nevertheless, there are now experimental cancer drugs that might be able to flush the virus out and make it vulnerable. However, this approach requires drugs to make the virus active and a vaccine to train the immune system to finish it off, which is not just round the corner.

There is another route being considered - involving a rare mutation that leaves people resistant to HIV infection. In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown became the first patient believed to have recovered from HIV. His immune system was destroyed as part of leukemia treatment. It was then restored with a stem-cell transplant from a patient with the mutation. However these are all distant prospects.