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a first patient cured thanks to an experimental drug?

A report released on Tuesday July 7 could offer a glimmer of hope in the fight against HIV. Report indicates that a Brazilian national infected with the virus no longer showed any signs of his presence in his body, and this for more than a year after the end of an experimental therapy. This treatment, which uses an experimental drug, aims to destroy the latent virus in the body.

If the case of the Brazilian patient is well confirmed, it would be the first time that HIV is eliminated from the body of a patient without having undergone a stem cell or bone marrow transplant. Transplantation has been the only treatment so far that has succeeded in curing HIV-positive people. These are patients nicknamed “London patient” and “Berlin patient”. They received a graft from donors with a gene that confers natural immunity to HIV. But doctors call the procedure very risky and not at all practical.

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Treating patients with medication would therefore be the ideal solution for eliminating HIV in an infected person. However, scientists explain that the results of this latest study do not mean that the cure for AIDS has definitely been found. It will indeed be necessary to carry out many independent verifications before being able to really decide.

The treatment followed by the Brazilian patient

According to scientists, removing HIV from a person’s body is not easy since the virus will create a sort of reservoir of blood cells where it will be dormant. This reservoir is impossible to attack by the immune system or by drugs. However, it is possible to control the infection using these, except that stopping treatment will reactivate the latent virus and revive the disease.

During his study, Dr. Ricardo Diaz of the University of Sao Paulo, with the help of his team, used powerful combinations of drugs to try to “purge” the reservoir of HIV. According to him, they tried to wake up the dormant virus and then strengthen the immune system so that it can eliminate it. The patient in question was taking a set of three standard products to control HIV. Diaz and his colleagues prescribed two more medications to intensify treatment, dolutegravir and maraviroc, as well as nicotinamide, a form of vitamin B3 that may help expose the dormant virus.

This shock treatment was followed for about a year, then the patient returned to his three standard medications for two years. In March 2019, he was asked to stop his treatment, and since then, the virus has not been detected in any of his samples.

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Caution is advised

According to Dr. Monica Gandhi, an AIDS specialist working at the University of California, San Francisco, this discovery is really exciting, however, these are still preliminary results. In fact, only one person tested negative for HIV after this new treatment. The latter did not work in the 4 other study subjects, as well as in the 30 people who participated in a study using similar approaches.

Diaz says that the treatment they have developed is very promising and that the patient could be completely cured. However, it will still take time to be sure. The scientist has already announced that he has been given the opportunity to start a new study this time involving 60 patients. This will have the support of the Brazilian government, as well as the company ViiV Healthcare which produces maraviroc.

It will take a while before we know if this new treatment is the one that all people with HIV have been waiting for years. In any case, it can be said that this is a big step in the fight against HIV-AIDS, which has already claimed millions of lives in recent decades.

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