For years, Philip Goulder is obsessed with a very engaging idea: Can children in hunting for an HIV healing keep the answers?
From mid-2010s, the University of Oxford Pediatrician and Immunologist started working with scientists in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, with the aim of finding several hundred children who acquired HIV from their mothers, whether during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
After placing the children on antiretroviral medicine early in their lives to control the virus, Gulder and his colleagues were eager to monitor their progress and compliance with standard antiretroviral treatment, which prevented HIV from being repeated. But something unusual happened about the subsequent decade. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team eventually found them many months later, it seemed like they were in perfect health.
“Instead of being viral loads through the roof, they were undetectable,” Gulder says. ‘And normally rebound within two or three weeks.’
In a study published last year, Gulder described how all five remained, despite not receiving regular antiretroviral medication for some time, and in one case up to 17 months. In the decades of search for an HIV healing, it provides an tempting insight: that the first widespread success in healing HIV may not be in adults, but in children.
At the recent conference in the International Aids Society held in Mid-July in Kigali, Rwanda, Alfredo Tagarro, a pediatrician at Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, offered a new study showing that about 5 percent of HIV-infected children receiving antiretrovirals within the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of the first six months of Gen-viruses-to the genetic reservoThe number of cells that have the viruses, the serving of the HIV viral reservo-neglect levels. “Children have special immunological features that make it more likely that we will develop an HIV healing for them before other populations,” says Tagarro.
His thoughts were reflected by another doctor, Mark Cotton, which directs the clinical research unit of the Children’s Infectious Diseases at the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town.
“Children have a much more dynamic immune system,” Cotton says. ‘They also have no additional problems such as high blood pressure or kidney problems. This initially makes them a better target for a cure. “
According to Tagarro, children with HIV have long been “left” to find a treatment that can permanently place HIV-positive individuals in remission. Since 2007, ten adults have been thought to have been healed after receiving stem cell transplants to treat life -threatening blood cancer, a procedure that eventually eliminated the virus. But with such procedures that are both complicated and very risky – other patients have died in the wake of similar attempts – it is not considered a viable strategy to specifically guide HIV.
Instead, like Gouler, pediatricians increasingly noted that a small subpopulation of children, after the onset of antiretroviral treatment, a small subpopulation of children for months, years and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone. This realization initially began with certain isolated case studies: the ‘Mississippi Baby’ who controlled the virus for more than two years without medication, and a South African child who was considered possible and kept the virus in remission for more than a decade. Cotton says he suspects that between 10 and 20 percent of all HIV-infected children could control the virus for a significant period, beyond the typical two to three weeks, after stopping antiretroviral drugs.