Researchers are full of good news this week. Bookended by one study presented at the 19th Annual International AIDS Conference and another published in Nature showing significant progress towards a cure for HIV, the case of two American men who appear to have already beaten the disease is getting everybody excited. Both men had been diagnosed with both HIV and lymphoma — AIDS patients are particularly susceptible to cancer — and underwent experimental stem cell transplants. Three and a half and two years later, respectively, doctors can’t find a trace of HIV left in their bodies. This roughly what happened with Timothy Ray Brown, a.k.a. “The Berlin Patient,” who famously became the first man cured of HIV after undergoing similar stem cell treatments for his leukemia. So there it is. Three men who used to have HIV that now do not. That’s a trend, is it not?Not so fast. In the world of HIV/AIDS, “cure” is a loaded, dangerous term. Researchers have been chipping away at this problem for the past three decades, and they’re deeply hesitant to say that they’ve succeeded in eradicating the disease from any patient. Officially, Brown is the only one considered cured as he’s been off antiretroviral therapy for years without experiencing a viral rebound. The other two men will continue to take their medication until they can be taken off under experimental conditions. “We didn't want to overplay our hand,” said Timothy J. Henrich of Harvard Medical School, who oversaw the treatment. “It is possible there is other residual HIV material somewhere.”But these guys aren’t the only ones making miraculous progress. In the two other studies mentioned earlier, a number of people underwent experimental new treatments that yielded impressive results. Published in Nature, one involved giving eight patients the cancer drug vorinostat to wake up latent HIV cells so that antiretroviral drugs would be effective at eliminating them. Researchers are saying that discovering this new use of vorinostat could be as significant as the development of AZT, the first drug used to treat HIV. In a separate study presented at the International AIDS Conference, 14 French patients received HIV treatment just weeks after being infected and continued with the treatment for three years before stopping. Now six years later, they have little or no HIV left in their blood. “We believe that this is a really promising group of patients,” said Asier Saez Ciron from the Institut Pasteur in France. “This is a promise that the functional cure could be achieved.”While they’re reticent to describe any of these advances as finding a cure, scientists will admit that we’ve entered a new era of HIV/AIDS research. In the end, there might not be a single silver bullet, but at this point we can start moving these various experimental treatments towards the mainstream. “Today might be considered a day when the research agenda moves from basic science and the lab into the clinic,” said Steven G. Deeks, an AIDS researcher at the University of California at San Francisco. “It is an absolutely critical advancement.” Okay, now you can celebrate.
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