After 16 years of dtente, scientists are once again ready to go to war with the AIDS virus.
Researchers who once thought a cure was impossible are again ready to try. At a meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C., just days before 25,000 people will attend the international AIDS 2012 conference, HIV researchers unveiled a "road map" to the cure.
"The burden of treating millions of people for 40, 50, 60 years is unbearable, untenable," says David Margolis, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a member of the International AIDS Society, which released the strategy for a cure. "The cure agenda needs to be put forward in a serious way."
In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, having HIV was universally fatal. Drug cocktails developed in the mid-1990s, brought the fight against AIDS to a sort of stalemate, allowing patients to live with the virus for years, Margolis says.
Improvements in anti-AIDS therapy have reduced the drugs' side effects. Still, patients now have to deal with complications, such as heart problems, bone disorders and memory problems, says the strategy statement, published in Nature Reviews Immunology.
The cost of treating the world's 34 million HIV-positive patients is staggering, at an estimated $24 billion a year by 2015, the AIDS Society says.
The world scientific community has been inspired by what, in some ways, could seem like a fluke: the case of the only person ever truly cured of HIV, says Diane Havlir, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco and the U.S. co-chairwoman for AIDS 2012.
Timothy Brown, known as the "Berlin patient," is a unique case in every way. The 40-year-old American was cured of HIV after undergoing a bone-marrow transplant in Germany for leukemia in 2007. The transplant came from a donor with a genetic mutation that provided resistance to HIV.
"The fact that one person has been cured is a total game changer," Havlir says.
Possible cures could involve improving treatments to prevent the virus from making copies of itself, gene therapy, and treatment vaccines to boost the immune system, the strategy statement says. Margolis also is working on one of the most exciting strategies, which scientists describe as "shock and kill."
The AIDS virus, after infecting its hosts, can hide in immune cells for many years. Drugs can keep the virus in check but not kill it, because they can't get to it, Margolis says. His work involves using a drug, already licensed to treat a rare cancer, that "flushes" the virus out of cells. With the virus "unmasked," doctors hope to use drugs to kill it, Margolis says.
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PUBDATE = 07/20/2012
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