Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?
Over the past year, news of two new people cured of HIV grabbed headlines, stirring hopeful talk of what these scientific wonders might portend for the four-decade fight against the virus.
To researchers working in the HIV cure arena, these cases are inspiring because they prove it is in fact possible to eradicate this extraordinarily complex virus from the body.
That said, such cures are the result of treatments too toxic to attempt on all but a select few. So while they provide a scientific roadmap toward success, they do not necessarily make researchers’ job any easier as they work to develop alternatives: safe, effective and, crucially, scalable therapies to cure HIV.
“HIV has been a tough nut to track,” says Marshall Glesby, an infectious disease specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a coauthor of one of the recent HIV cure case studies. “But there is incremental progress being made in terms of our understanding of where the virus hides within the body and potential ways to purge it from those sites.”
The HIV cure research field is yet quite young. And it likely never would have ballooned as it has in recent years were it not for the very first successful cure—one that served as a catalyst and guiding light for scientists.
Read the full story at NOVA.
Source : NOVA
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