HIV-Victory

        The ribbon will be turned upside down soon 

 

        Cured! That is perhaps a word no one would have dared to speak when it came to AIDS.
Timothy Brown, an American who was living with AIDS since 1995 is the first patient to have overcome the infection through a bone marrow transplant performed in 2007.

The future seems bright as 4 methods to treat the virus are being developed: 

1. By grafting an immune system already resistant to HIV

            This is the technique that was used to heal Timothy Brown. 0.3% of the population has a mutation called "double deletion delta 32" which makes them resistant to AIDS through impermeable cells. The principle is to graft a bone marrow taken from a donor whose DNA is compatible with the patient and who has the mutation making it resistant to HIV.

            Since a bone marrow is the source of the formation of the immune system, the patient develops new grafted immune defenses that can fight the virus.
Unfortunately this heavy method is not without risks and can never cover all HIV-positive patients because it requires a specific genetic profile entirely consistent with a donor carrying the mutation ... a rare thing to find.

2. By acting on the genes of white blood cells (results expected in 2020)

            Widely criticized a year ago, this technique has turned a corner in 2012.
The purpose is to build up reserves of white blood cells resistant to HIV. The principle consists of using enzymes that can cut into the genome of white blood cells the genes that control the production of CCR5 a receptor used by the HIV virus to enter the cells. Thus, the white cells without these receptors become impermeable to the virus.
The first tests conducted on 15 people at the University of California, are promising.

3) By awakening the virus to eliminate it (expected results for 2017-2020)

            This technique involves the administration of cocktails of made from various molecules that reactivate latent viruses in cells to enable retroviral tanks to destroy them. The reason is that these treatments can do nothing against dormant viruses who have integrated their genome within the DNA of the tanks. However, these studies are not without danger: some molecules could activate latent retroviruses hidden in our genome for over millions of years ("endovirus") with a cancer risk.

4. Rapidly activating the HIV (expected results for 2015-2016)

            This technique was inspired by a couple of positive people whose immune system has learned to control the virus and from the early stages of infection when the patients stopped taking their antiviral drugs. Thus early and transient administration of antiviral could prevent the destruction of the immune system and limit the damage caused by the virus.In this case, testing must be done very quickly.