A 44-year-old man from Britain might be the first person ever cured from HIV.
After a series of tests, doctors have not been able to detect the virus in an HIV positive man from Britain after he was treated with a revolutionary therapy, designed to find and kill the virus.
Even though, researchers don’t want to jump to any conclusions, and say it is still too early to tell whether the treatment really worked or not. But the man, who is a social worker, made “remarkable progress” without a doubt. He was the first of 50 people to complete the trial of a new type of HIV therapy.
While older treatments attacked infected active cells but leaves dormant cells unharmed, the new one attacks HIV infected cells and the virus all over the body, including the dormant cells that used to escape previous treatment.
Mark Samuels from Britain’s National Institute for Health Research told The Sunday Times that “this is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV”.
”This is a huge challenge and it’s still early days, but the progress has been remarkable,” he added.
The new therapy and trials are being conducted in a collaborative venture between doctors and scientists at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, University College London and King’s College London.
Better known as HIV, human immunodeficiency virus is a disease mainly transmitted through sexual acts or infected needles. Once inside a human body, the virus weakens the person’s immune system by destroying T-cells, which are crucial to fighting disease and infection. Estimates claim that around 36.7 million people around the globe are infected with the virus.
