Has a Sixth Person been Cured of HIV?
A man in Europe known as the "Geneva Patient" might be on his way to becoming the sixth person considered to have been possibly cured of HIV, according to NBC News.
The last time such an announcement was made was almost exactly one year ago, when researchers at the International AIDS Conference disclosed that a 66-year-old man had been effectively cured of HIV.
As in the earlier five cases of people "who are considered either definitely or possibly cured of HIV," the "Geneva Patient" received "a stem cell transplant to treat blood cancer," NBC News relayed. In the wake of that treatment, he has been "in remission" from HIV for nearly two years.
"Since the first such case was announced in 2008, three people have definitely been cured and two additional people, pending more time passing without a viral rebound, have possibly been cured of HIV," NBC News recounted.
But there's a key difference in the case of the "Geneva Patient." NBC News noted that "unlike the five other cases, this new one involves a person whose donor did not have a rare genetic abnormality that generates resistance to HIV in the immune cells that the virus targets for infection."
The report explained that "HIV is vexingly difficult to cure" because "the virus hides in nonreplicating immune cells, known collectively as the viral reservoir," and "standard HIV treatment only works on cells that are actively producing new viral copies."
As a result, "the virus remains under the radar of antiretrovirals within these latently infected cells, each of which can take months or even years to return to a replicating state."
Currently, "a battery of ultrasensitive tests in search of HIV in his body... have only been able to detect trace amounts of defective virus" even 20 months after the "Geneva Patient" discontinued his standard HIV medication, the article detailed.
"But [researchers] still cannot rule out that the man retains even a single cell infected with viable virus, one that could spring to action at any moment and repopulate the body with HIV," NBC News cautioned.
Cases like this new one "help in many ways in the work toward a cure," according to the president of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, the news article added.
But don't expect the harrowing procedure that the "Geneva Patient" and the other five underwent to become standard treatment for HIV. NBC News pointed out that it "remains unethical for a person with HIV who does not already qualify for a stem cell transplant due to cancer to undergo such a treatment in hopes of curing the virus, given such treatment's considerable toxicity."
In the meantime, effective regimens of antiretrovirals can manage the disease and keep viral loads so low as to be undetectable — at which point, it is thought to be virtually impossible for a person living with HIV to transmit it to others through sex. That fact makes early diagnosis and treatment crucial in the current fight to reduce HIV transmission and, eventually, eradicate HIV/AIDS. Testing for the virus plays a central role in those efforts.