AIDS: cases of near-cure studied
An American girl and 14 adults in France managed to control the AIDS infection despite stopping the drugs: French virologists publish new details on these promising apparent "cures", the result of early therapy.
Patients contaminated in France by the AIDS virus (HIV) and quickly put on antiretrovirals (ten weeks after infection) continue seven and a half years after having stopped taking these drugs to naturally contain their infection. These French researchers had revealed the results of this so-called Visconti study last July in Washington at the international AIDS conference.
They publish today in the American journal PloS Pathogens, more details on these "cures". Some of these patients, they explain, have seen a decrease in the number of infected cells circulating in their blood over the past four years despite the absence of antiretrovirals. These contaminated "dormant" cells re-start the infection in most HIV-positive people a few weeks after stopping antiretrovirals.
In early March, American virologists announced the apparent recovery of a baby girl infected at birth with HIV transmitted by her untreated HIV-positive mother. He is the first known child able to control his infection without treatment. As with patients in the Visconti group, the virus has not been completely eradicated, but its presence is so weak that the body's immune system can control it without antiviral therapy. The young child had received antiretrovirals within 30 hours of birth, much earlier than is normally done for newborns at high risk of being infected. She was treated until 18 months, the age at which doctors lost track of her for ten months and during which she had no treatment.
None of the subsequent blood tests detected the presence of HIV. Only traces of the virus have been detected by genetic analysis but not sufficient for its replication.
In the case of Visconti's patients, they stopped taking antiretrovirals after three years. The viral presence remains undetectable. "The early treatment probably contained the viral reservoirs, and preserved the immune responses, a combination which could certainly have favored the control of the infection after stopping the treatment", explains Professor Christine Rouzioux, from the Necker hospital in Paris who coordinated the research.
As in the case of the child, starting antiretroviral treatment very early did not make it possible to know whether the patients of Visconti would not have spontaneously controlled their infection. Less than one percent of the so-called "natural controller" population can contain HIV without ever taking antiretrovirals. But in the case of the 14 French patients, most did not have the genetic profile or the same type of immune responses observed in these "controllers", say these researchers.
According to Dr. Laurent Hocqueloux, from Orléans-La Source hospital in France, one of the members of the research on the Visconti group, "it is estimated at around 10%" the prevalence of people similar to those of the Visconti cohort in the population in which no particular genetic characteristics have been observed.
These cases "offer hope for discovering new mechanisms to control the infection," he said. In an attempt to advance this research, the National AIDS Research Agency (ANRS) will coordinate in the coming months a larger group of patients similar to those of Visconti at European level.
The only officially recognized complete cure for AIDS in the world is that of the American Timothy Brown, says the patient from Berlin.
He was declared cured after a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation preventing the virus from entering cells. The purpose of this transplant was to treat leukemia.
AFP Posted on 14/03/2013 at 21:23
http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2013/ ... tudies.php
Finally, a timid recognition of the importance of the organism to restore a defective immune system ...