We've come a long way in our understanding of HIV. Rather than being the death sentence it was seen as in the 80s, it's now possible for patients to live with the disease.
We may have come a long way, but we have a long way left to go — and the latest news, some of the most encouraging yet, could be a gamechanger.
HIV is much more manageable than it once was. But managing it means living with it, because finding a proper cure — one that would remove it from the body — has proven elusive.
That said, it's incredibly rare. Since the global epidemic began more than three decades ago, it's believed that just one patient has been known to be cured of the disease.
This comes a full ten years after the first patient. Studying this patient could give researchers and doctors invaluable data on how the disease develops and, hopefully, on how it can be thwartd.
The study published in the scholarly journal Nature, details their findings. They're not quite calling it a cure — rather, "long-term remission" — but it certainly does appear to be legitimately cured in this patient.
Their success gives them the chance to try and replicate their results. This has proven to be tricky in the past, as it's been tough to duplicate a known cure — but it's a start.
In both cured patients, bone marrow transplants were apparently the magic bullet. But, surprisingly, in both cases, the bone marrow was designed to treat cancer, not HIV.
Specialists are armed with powerful drugs to help control HIV. Bone marrow transplantation, on the other hand, can be risky and carry various side effects. But doctors are saying it's not bad as a practical treatment.
In an email to the New York Times, the anonymous patient said it was "overwhelming" to be cured of both cancer and HIV, all in one fell swoop.
Again, it can be risky and carry nasty side effects. But basically, the transplant obliterates the cancer, and the transplanted immune cells become resistant to HIV, and eventually these resistant cells move in to replace more vulnerable cells.
Research on finding a cure for HIV is currently a going concern in the medical research community, with companies exploring therapies ranging from stem cells to gene therapy.
The side effects necessitate ongoing monitoring. Still, a second person has been cured of HIV. Both advances have come in the past 15 years, after decades of the disease killing millions of people.
It's great to know progress is being made.
