Starting from mid-2010, the pediatrician and immunologist of the University of Oxford started working with scientists in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, with the aim of tracking down several hundred children who had acquired HIV from their mothers, during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
After putting the children in antiretroviral drugs at the beginning of their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues were eager to monitor their progress and adherence to standard antiretroviral treatment, which prevents the HIV from replicating. But something unusual happened over the following decade. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs and when the team in the end traced them many months later, they seemed to be in perfect health.
“Instead that their viral loads are through the roof, they were not detectable,” says Goulder. “And normally the rebounds of the HIV within two or three weeks.”
In a study published last yearGoulder described how all five remained in remission, despite not having received regular antiretroviral drugs for some time and, in one case, up to 17 months. In the long search for a cure for HIV, this offered an attractive vision: that the first success spread in treating HIV may not come to adults, but in children.
At the recent Conference of the International Aids Society held in Kigali, in Rwanda, in mid -July, Alfredo Tagarro, a pediatrician at the University Hospital of Sofia in Infanta di Madrid, presented a new study that shows that about 5 percent of children with HIV infection that moves an anti -articles. “Children have special immunological characteristics, which makes it more likely that we will develop a cure for them before other populations,” says Tagarro.
His thoughts were echoed by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who directs 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. “Furthermore, they have no further problems such as high pressure or kidney problems. It makes them a target better, initially, for a cure.”
According to Tagarro, the children with HIV have long been “left behind” in the race to find a treatment that can permanently put HIV -positive individuals. Since 2007, 10 adults have been cared for, having received stem cell transplants to treat potentially lethal blood cancer, a procedure that has ended up eliminating the virus. However, with these procedures that are both complex and highly risky – other patients died in the aftermath of similar attempts – it is not considered a practical strategy to specifically affect HIV.
Instead, as Goulder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting the antiretroviral treatment at the beginning of life, a small underpowulation of children therefore seems to suppress HIV for months, years and perhaps also permanently with the immune system only. This realization initially started with some cases isolated study: the “Mississippi Baby” that controlled The virus for more than two years without drugs and a South African child who has been considered potentially treated having kept the virus in remission for more than a decade. Cotton claims to suspect that between 10 and 20 percent of all children with HIV infection would be able to control the virus for a significant period of time, in addition to the typical two or three weeks, after stopping antiretrovirali.