HIV breakthrough greeted with excitement and caution

Scientists are naturally cautious people, sometimes to the frustration of journalists.  And so it is with the announcement of the first functional cure in an baby born with HIV.  As exciting as the news seems, the researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Medical School warn they do not have enough data to recommend change in the current practice of treating infants at risk of HIV, which is to give them one dose of an antiretroviral drug.

In this instance, the baby was given a triple dose at 30 hours.  Twenty-nine days later, levels of the virus were virtually undetectable and more than two years later the standard blood test found no signs of the virus.

If, the scientists say, this can be replicated then there it has enormous implications for the 300,000 babies born worldwide every year with the virus.  It would mean the children would grow up without having to take antiretrovirals for the rest of their lives, they would not have the fear hanging over them of the virus turning to Aids, of becoming ill and dying, and it would save millions – even billions – of pounds for developing countries already struggling to cope with this epidemic.

Last year, I interviewed a number of mothers in a mother and child clinic in Yekaterinburg, in Russia’s Ural mountains.  The children had been born with HIV largely because the women had been unknowingly infected by their injecting drug-using partners.  It was a tragedy for both the mother and the baby.  Not only was the woman learning that she was carrying the virus but she also had to live with the knowledge that her child had become infected.

Of course, if their partners had been honest and told them that they were infected the women could have been treated before the birth with antiretrovirals to minimise the amount of virus in their blood.  The baby would also have been treated with a course of drugs.  This is a protocol that reduces the risk of the baby becoming infected by 98 per cent.

Now, there is hope for those mothers who are ignorant of their status – as was, apparently, this mother in Mississippi.

But this was not the only good news out of the catchily titled Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.  A team from the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, say they have found where HIV lurks in the DNA.  If the cell becomes active the virus then becomes active.

Now Professor Sharon Lewin, The Alfred’s director of infectious diseases, has said they have found a cancer drug which turns on the sleeping HIV-infected cells so they can be detected.  All of which is an important step towards finding a way of getting rid of it.

Again, it is early days and larger studies will be needed.  But at last year’s International Aids Conference there was talk of finding a cure and just six months later it feels as if it might actually happen.

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