A French teenager born with HIV has been declared free from infection a full 12 years after stopping her treatments.
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The evidence of the two clinical trials presented Monday at the 8th global AIDS Society (IAS) conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Vancouver will play a significant role as the World Health Organization crafts updated HIV Treatment guidelines, said Gottfried Hirnschall, director of the agency’s HIV department.
Her family decided to stop treatment when she was six years old but the virus levels in her bloodstream are still too low to be measured – but doctors warn this could change.
“We need to identify a robust test to measure very low levels of virus or find a better way to predict this idea of post-treatment control”.
“We provide the proof of concept that long-term remission is possible in children, as in adults”, said Dr Saez-Cirion. She is not necessarily cured of the disease-the virus is in remission and could still be present in some of her cells and could return, according to the article.
Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who co-discovered HIV in 1983, and works at the Institut Pasteur, said: “We are learning from this patient, that’s why it’s so exciting. It is just one girl and she is not completely cured, she still has the virus detectable in her DNA”. She was treated with four antiretroviral drugs when the virus persisted.
In the case of the French teenager, the girl was infected with HIV either at the end of her mother’s pregnancy or during childbirth.
“This will prevent many, many people from acquiring HIV infection and it will allow people in couples to actually live a very carefree life as far as their infection is concerned”, said Garcia. Starting antiretroviral therapy early reduced HIV transmission by 93 percent over the course of the study, the findings showed.
The significance of the research findings is that AIDS medications, when used consistently, can break the chain of HIV transmission, with the potential to eradicate the virus when all infected people die natural deaths.
Some new HIV drug research findings were released this week that affirm a scientific understanding that has been growing now for a few years. Fauci said that by focusing on these areas, understanding the drivers of HIV risk and deploying prevention technologies, HIV transmission could be decreased dramatically, finally halting the spread of HIV.
She kept taking HIV drugs until She was almost 6, when doctors lost contact with her. when doctors saw her again a year later, the girl’s mother said she had stopped giving her daughter the HIV drugs. “From that logic, everybody (who is HIV positive) should be treated because in any patient who is HIV infected but with a high CD4-positive count there is some immune deficiency that antiretroviral treatment can essentially fix”.
Sharon Lewin, an AIDS scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said “it’s always hard to know, when you have a single case report, is there something about this particular individual that’s unique?”
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The study included 4,600 people in 35 countries who got treatment either as soon as possible after diagnosis, or who were told to wait until there were signs of immune system damage. But, he says of the French teenager and other post-treatment controllers, “it’s impossible to prove that they would not have done well in the absence of therapy”.
