AIDS researchers and global health community ponder a reported cure

AIDS researchers, advocacy organizations and global health officials spent Monday trying to determine whether the report that a baby girl born in Mississippi was cured of the infection is a therapeutic breakthrough or a scientific curiosity.

Even if the report proves true, aggressive HIV treatment starting at birth has no obvious relevance to adults, who are by far the biggest age group infected each year. Even in newborns it may be of little practical use, as nearly all mother-to-child infections can be prevented by a simpler strategy that isn’t yet fully implemented around the world.

Video

Doctors say a baby in Mississippi born with HIV has been cured after receiving aggressive treatment just 30 hours after birth. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases explains.

Baby born with HIV is apparently cured with aggressive drug treatment

David Brown

Unusual case raises hopes for more than 300,000 babies born with the infection around the world each year.

Spotlight on the Mississippi doctor who treated baby with HIV infection

Lena H. Sun and Brady Dennis

Hannah Berry Gay is a former missionary in Ethi­o­pia and a mother of four who dislikes the spotlight.

At the same time, news of a cured patient — the girl, now 2¹ / _2, would be only the second on record — has caught the world’s eye. Scientists are confident that even if the case isn’t a signpost to the future, it is of great importance right now.

“Just like the first case [of a cure], it is generating a tremendous amount of attention and more importantly a tremendous number of testable hypotheses,” said Steven Deeks, an AIDS researcher at the University of California at San Francisco and a leader of the effort to reinvigorate the search for an AIDS cure.

“I think if that is confirmed, it is one of the greatest pieces of news we can have,” said Michel Sidibé, director of UNAIDS. “It can bring us one step closer to the AIDS-free generation.”

Sidibé, who spoke from Botswana, said UNAIDS will soon convene a meeting of researchers and global health officials to discuss how and where to test the Mississippi strategy. The most likely sites are in sub-Saharan Africa, where 91 percent of mother-to-child infections occur.

“More studies need to be done to understand the outcome,” he said.

UNAIDS’s deputy director for science, Luiz Loures, said designing a clinical trial to test the Mississippi strategy “is not a major challenge.” Implementing it on a large scale is another matter. That would require laboratory equipment that detects the virus, which is not available in many rural settings in the developing world.

About 330,000 babies become infected with HIV each year, either in the womb, during delivery, or through breast-feeding. That number has fallen steadily in recent years as countries have implemented a prevention strategy that can cut the mother-to-child rate of transmission from 30 percent to 1 percent. The Mississippi case, described at a scientific meeting in Atlanta, suggests a tool that could reduce the number further.

“Is 1 percent an acceptable transmission rate?” asked Deborah Persaud, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center who was involved in the Mississippi case. “If we have a way to cure the infection in the 1 percent who get it, then that should be our goal.”

She said that triple-therapy-at-birth would probably be given only to newborns at unusually high risk of being infected. In most cases that would be those whose mothers were never treated, or became infected late in pregnancy and didn’t know it.

Today, slightly more than 60 percent of pregnant, HIV-infected women in the developing world receive the recommended drugs to prevent transmission of the virus to their babies. Increasing that number is a major priority of many countries and organizations.