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HIV cure: the long road ahead
Keith Alcorn, 2013-05-31 07:10:00

Scientists from around the world met to review the future of HIV scientific research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, last week, 30 years after the discovery of HIV by a team based at the institute.The prospects for a cure for HIV infection were a major theme of the meeting, which attracted around 500 scientists, chiefly from France and the United States.

“We’ve had some very interesting little lights at the end of the tunnel from individual studies regarding the possibility of a cure,” said Dr Tony Fauci, director of the US National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, referring to two recently reported cases and two studies. In the first case, Timothy Brown, the so-called `Berlin patient`, was cured of HIV infection after a bone marrow transplant from a donor with genetic resistance to HIV infection.

Professor Steve Deeks of the University of California San Francisco, who took part in extensive tests to determine whether Timothy Brown was free of HIV, told the conference: “We have concluded that he is as cured as you are going to get.”

In the second case an infant treated almost immediately after delivery was reported to be controlling HIV infection after nearly 18 months off treatment. Researchers are describing this case as a functional cure.

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