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Five HIV patients left 'virus-free' with no need for daily drugs in early vaccine trials


Ryusei the Morning Star

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Not the biggest fan of these kinds of articles. Optimism should be taken with a grain of salt here. Be positive but expect nothing, citations from the source article indicate it might be just a fluke and we see how fast these stories turn out to be nothing more than getting ahead of ourselves.

 

Also as evidenced by the linked PDF of the experiment these notes are pretty freaking old: https://www.iasociety.org/Web/WebContent/File/HIV_Cure_Symposium_2015/Posters/PE46.pdf

 

If someone could bother to find a follow up on the experiment/study instead of this, it would lend to greater optimism.

 

 


In 10 of the participants, the virus rapidly bounced back, forcing them to return to ART. But five of the participants no longer needed to take the drugs because their immune systems could suppress the virus unaided.

 

 


One person has been off ART for seven months now. The other four have been free of detectable virus for six, 14, 19 and 21 weeks, respectively. Mothe, who revealed the results at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle last week, says they will follow each participant to see how long they can control the virus themselves.

 


It isn’t clear why two-thirds of the group didn’t respond to the therapy – Mothe and her colleagues are investigating this now.

 


While the results are significant, excitement should be tempered. Previous treatments have appeared to “cure” people with HIV only for the virus to later return. For instance, after being born to a mother with HIV, a baby in Mississippi was treated with ART for 18 months. This seemed to cure her of the virus but it returned when she was 4. HIV has also re-emerged months after ART was stopped in two men who appeared to have got rid of the virus after bone marrow transplants two years earlier.

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