A man in Brazil has apparently been “cleared” of HIV thanks to “a novel drug strategy designed to flush the AIDS virus out of all of its reservoirs in the body,” according to an article published today (Tuesday, July 7) in Science magazine.
The 36-year-old man who has asked to be referred to only as The Sao Paulo Patient, received “an especially aggressive combination of antiretroviral drugs and nicotinamide — Vitamin B3 — and then went off all HIV treatment in March 2019. In the year and three months since, according to the magazine’s report, written by Jon Cohen, the virus has not returned to his blood.
These results, the magazine notes, makes the Sao Paulo Patient the “proof of principle in humans” for the ARV/B3 combination treatment.
Cohen write that most patients who suppress HIV with ARVs then later stop treatment see virus return in high levels within weeks. The Sao Paulo Patient not only did not experience a rebound but in fact saw his HIV antibodies drop to “extremely low levels, hinting at the possibility he may have cleared infected cells in the lymph nodes and gut.”
Clinical investigator Ricardo Diaz of the Federal University of Sao Paulo, who is running the story, did not claim the patient is cured, but added that the patient “has very little antigen” (HIV proteins that trigger the production of antibodies and other immune responses — but also noted that his team has not sampled the patient’s lymph nodes or gut for HIV since he stopped treatment.
University of California, San Francisco clinician Steven Deeks told Science magazine the story out of Brazil is “remarkable,” but cautioned that the “success hasn’t been long or definitive enough to label it a cure,” Cohen wrote,
Cohen’s article also notes that only two other people are known to have been cured of HIV infections. Timothy Ray Brown and The London Patient both received bone marrow transplants while being treated for cancer, and the transplants “cleared their infections and gave them new immune systems that resist” HIV infection.
There have been other cases in which patients appeared to have been cured, but the virus returned after being gone for a long time.
— Tammye Nash
