The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children

For years, Philip Goulder was obsessed with a particularly captivating idea: in hunting for healing of HIV, could children keep the answers?

From the mid-2010 mid-2010s, the pediatrician and immunologist at the University of Oxford began to work with scientists from the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, in order to follow several hundred children who had acquired the HIV of their mother, that is, during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.

After putting children on antiretroviral drugs at the start of their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues wanted to monitor their progress and their accession to standard antiretroviral treatment, which prevents HIV from being replicated. But during the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to recover their medicines, and when the team finally found them several months later, they seemed to be perfectly healthy.

“Instead that their viral charges were through the roof, they were undetectable,” explains Goulder. “And normally, HIV bounces in two or three weeks.”

In a study published last year, Goulder described how the five remained in remission, despite which have not received regular antiretroviral drugs for a certain time, and in a case, up to 17 months. During the search for decades, it offered an enticing overview: that the first generalized success to heal HIV may not come to adults, but in children.

During the recent international AIDS Society conference held in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid -July, Alfredo Tagarro, pediatrician at the Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, presented a new study showing 5% of children infected with HIV who receive antiretrovirals in the first six months of life – Viral of the number of people – The number of cells is reserving lively. Levels. “Children have special immunological characteristics, which makes us more likely that we will develop a remedy for HIV for them before other populations,” said Tagarro.

His thoughts were reproduced by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who heads the clinical research unit of children’s infectious diseases at the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town.

“Children have a much more dynamic immune system,” says Cotton. “They also have no additional problems such as high blood pressure or kidney problems. This makes it a better target, at the start, for a healing. ”

According to Tagarro, children with HIV have long been “left behind” in the race to find a treatment that can permanently put HIV positive individuals in remission. Since 2007, 10 adults would have been healed, having received stem cell transplants to treat potentially deadly blood cancer, a procedure that ended up eliminating the virus. However, with such procedures being both complex and very risky – other patients died in the aftermath of similar attempts – it is not considered a viable strategy to specifically target HIV.

Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have noticed more and more than after starting an antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small sub-population of children then seems to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone. This awareness initially started with certain isolated case studies: the “Mississippi baby” which controlled the virus for more than two years without medication, and a South African child who was considered potentially healed after keeping the virus in remission for more than a decade. Cotton says he suspects that between 10 and 20 percent of all the children infected with HIV would be able to control the virus for a significant period of time, beyond the two to three typical weeks, after having stopped antiretrovirals.