Scientists yesterday vowed to press ahead with their quest for a cure for AIDS, despite losing a veteran colleague and suffering a setback in research.
Addressing a symposium on the search for a cure, French Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi said the death of Joep Lange, a frontline scientist in the 33-year war on AIDS, was a major setback.
“He was firmly believing that a cure for HIV was possible, as we all do,” she said of the Dutchman, who was on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which went down over Ukraine.
Photo: AFP
“I am convinced that he, like the other members of the HIV community that were in that plane, would have encouraged us to go on,” she said.
Barre-Sinoussi, who co-discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes AIDS, launched the cure campaign several years ago amid skepticism by some that the goal could ever be attainable.
Despite this, optimism has grown, and cure scientists are confident that they know a lot more about HIV. After being beaten back by antiretroviral drugs, HIV retreats to a tiny number of cells in the body, holing up there as a safe haven, and becomes undetectable in the blood.
However, if the drugs are stopped, the virus rebounds within a few weeks, infecting CD4 cells in the immune system and exposing the body once more to dangerous, opportunistic microbes.
The six-day International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, which is due to start today, is set to hear more tomorrow about the so-called “kick-and-kill” strand in cure research. The objective is to pinpoint these reservoirs, flush out the virus with powerful drugs and then destroy it.
However, a strategy that sparked hopes of a cure — delivering a powerful dose of drugs at the earliest stage of infection — has been dealt a blow.
The hopes centered on a US infant, known anonymously as “the Mississippi Baby,” who was born with HIV. She was given drugs immediately at birth and the treatment continued for 18 months, at which point physicians lost track of her.
When doctors next checked her five months later, they found no sign of the virus. In the run-up to the AIDS conference, though, it was discovered that after the child had lived for 27 months without HIV and drugs, the virus had returned.
Jack Whitescarver, the director of the office for AIDS research at the US National Institutes of Health said: “This really demonstrates that we are still in the early days [of research]. We will continue to make cure research a high priority and use this information to move the scientific agenda forward.”
Another area of cure research is bone marrow transplants to generate new, uninfected immune cells. Yesterday, researchers at Australia’s University of New South Wales said two men with HIV now had undetectable levels of the virus after receiving bone marrow transplants for cancer.
In one case, the patient had a successful transplant for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His donor had one of two possible copies of a gene that gives protection against HIV.
However, in the second case, the man had a bone marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukaemia with a donation that did not have the gene protecting against HIV.
Until now, the only person considered to have been cleared of HIV was US citizen Timothy Ray Brown, who had bone marrow transplants in 2007 and 2008.
His donor had both copies of the gene that protects against HIV. Brown was able to stop antiretroviral therapy and remains clear of the virus.
However, when two patients in Boston had transplants without the gene mutation, the virus returned after antiretrovirals were stopped.
Sharon Lewin, a leading cure investigator at Melbourne’s Monash University, said it was “very premature” to consider the latest research a cure.
“The patients are still on antiviral therapy, so you cannot say that a patient is cured of HIV until you’ve stopped the treatment,” she said.
Millions of lives have been saved by the advent of antiretroviral drugs.
Even so, about 35 million people around the world have HIV, a toll that climbs each year.
Wayne Koff, from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, said in an e-mail exchange with reporters that HIV was the most complex virus ever encountered by vaccine developers, but recent progress in human trials and experiments on lab monkeys showed a vaccine “is possible.”
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
SPIRITUAL COUPLE: Martha Louise has said she can talk with angels, while her husband, Durek Verrett, claims that he communicates with a broad range of spirits Social media influencers, reality stars and TV personalities were among the guests as the Norwegian king’s eldest child, Princess Martha Louise, married a self-professed US shaman on Saturday in a wedding ceremony following three days of festivities. The 52-year-old Martha Louise and Durek Verrett, who claims to be a sixth-generation shaman from California, tied the knot in the picturesque small town of Geiranger, one of Norway’s major tourist attractions located on a fjord with stunning views. Following festivities that started on Thursday, the actual wedding ceremony took place in a large white tent set up on a lush lawn. Guests
Four days after last scanning in for work, a 60-year-old office worker in Arizona was found dead in a cubicle at her workplace, having never left the building during that time, authorities said. Denise Prudhomme, who worked at a Wells Fargo corporate office, was found dead in a third-floor cubicle on Aug. 20, Tempe police said. She had last scanned into the building on Aug. 16 at 7am, police said. There was no indication she scanned out of the building after that. Prudhomme worked in an underpopulated area of the building. Her cause of death had not been determined, but police said the preliminary
‘DISCONNECTED’: Politics is one factor driving news avoidance, a professor said, adding that people who do not trust the government are more likely to tune it out Hannah Wong cried when the Hong Kong government effectively forced the territory’s Apple Daily and Stand News out of business three years ago. Among the last news firms in the territory willing to criticize the government openly, many saw their end as a sign that the old Hong Kong was gone for good. Today, the 35-year-old makeup artist says she has gone from reading the news every day to reducing her intake drastically to protect herself from despair. Four years into a crackdown on dissent that has swept up democracy-leaning journalists, rights advocates and politicians in the territory, a lot of people
RSS