Marcela Boyacá Mesa
Latin News Agency for Medicine and Public Health
The 23rd edition of the International AIDS Conference will present a study by the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) in Brazil that indicates having eliminated HIV from the body of an HIV-positive patient only with medications.
The 34-year-old patient who was diagnosed in 2012 is the first in the world who has not had the virus detected for a long period after taking various AIDS drugs and without a bone marrow transplant.
The investigation has not yet finished and that is why the infectologist Ricardo Sobhie Díaz, coordinator of the study and director of the Retrovirology Laboratory of the Department of Medicine of Unifesp, indicated that “we are going to redo the investigation with the medicines that we observed that they worked better and with a new group of patients. “
Today there are only three patients in the world in which the AIDS virus is considered to have been completely eliminated without reappearing in the body. These three patients were also diagnosed with leukemia and received a bone marrow transplant from donors who do not produce a certain protein, whose presence in the blood is necessary for HIV to reproduce, this protein makes people immune to the virus.
Methodology
Thirty seropositive patients were recruited for the study, all with effective active antiretroviral treatment for two years, divided into six groups of five people, and each group received a different combination of drugs, in addition to standard treatment.
Results
The group with the best results was the one that received two more antiretrovirals than the others, dolutegravir and wonderfull, in addition they were also given nicotinamide and auranofin. This cocktail of drugs stimulates immunity by causing the virus to appear so that antibodies can find and fight it. The Brazilian patient has been 17 months without the virus in the body.
The coordinator of the HIV committee of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases, Valdez Madruga, pointed out the research as “quite promising. If the virus is removed in one patient out of five, that represents a 20% success rate, if this treatment has been able to cure a person, there is hope for other people who have the same circumstances. ”
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