The new HIV cure

The drugs may have hit the virus hard and early, wiping it off

Doctors from John Hopkins Children’s Center in the US recently announced that they had cured an HIV positive infant. This is the second documented case of a patient being declared free of the virus. In 2007, an adult male known as the Berlin patient was cured as a result of a bone-marrow transplant.

The infant contracted the virus in the womb, and was put on a high dose of anti-retroviral drugs even before test results confirming her HIV positive status reached the doctors.

Normally, newborns are started on low doses, and the intense regimen begins after confirmation of the virus. In this case, doctors believe, the drugs may have hit the virus hard and early, wiping it off. The baby continued to receive high doses for 18 months, after which the mother did not continue with the treatment. Normally, patients never get off anti-retrovirals, making it difficult to figure out whether they are HIV-free or if their HIV is just drug-suppressed. In this case, when the baby was brought to the doctors after five months of no medicine, the virus was undetectable.

The doctors believe early and aggressive anti-retroviral treatment prevented the formation of reservoirs that harbour the virus. Even though drugs stop HIV from replicating, the virus lurks dormant in the reservoirs, returning after treatment is stopped.

Some researchers, however, question the ‘cure’. A Wall Street Journal article quoted Steven Deeks, an AIDS researcher at University of California, as saying that “the cells infected [in the baby] weren’t the type that become long-lived reservoirs”.

This treatment regimen needs more testing. If the findings hold, it could play a major role in halting HIV infections in newborns.

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