#Brazilian man makes history with long term HIV remission

A Brazilian man with HIV has made history after becoming the first known person worldwide to experience long-term remission from the virus after taking an intensified cocktail of antiretroviral drugs, reports said Tuesday.

The 36-year-old, who asked to be referred to as the São Paulo Patient in order to protect his privacy, stopped taking all HIV treatment in March 2019 after taking an aggressive dose of ARVs and nicotinamide, or Vitamin B3, Science Magazine reported.

More than a year after receiving the large dose of medicine, the virus has yet to return to his blood, a development that has brought scientists one step closer to finding a cure for HIV/AIDS, the outlet reported.

“It’s too early to say what it means, but this could be a historic point in our battle to conquer HIV,” Matthew Hodson, executive director of NAM aidsmap, a British HIV/AIDS information charity, told Reuters. “This is enough to give us hope and avenues to explore, but not enough to say with certainty that this person has been cured.”

The treatment given to the Sao Paulo patient was designed to flush the virus from all reservoirs in the body, but unlike other patients who take ARVs and later stop treatment, the virus didn’t come back to high levels within weeks, Science Magazine reported.

HIV antibodies in the patient’s body also dropped to extremely low levels, which could show the drugs wiped out infected cells in the gut and lymph nodes, the outlet said.

The clinical investigator behind the study, Ricardo Diaz of the Federal University of São Paulo, said Tuesday at the AIDS 2020 conference he doesn’t know if the patient is cured and the man’s lymph nodes and guts still need to be sampled, the outlet said.

However, Diaz did note that the patient “has very little antigen,” which refers to HIV proteins that produce antibodies and other immune responses, showing the virus could be out of his system.

While there are two people in the world who’ve been cured of HIV, both did so after receiving bone marrow transplants as part of cancer treatment, the outlet said. The transplant did clear the infections and created new immune responses, but such transplants are expensive and complicated, which doesn’t make for a practical cure for the 38 million people living with the virus.

The Brazilian patient provides hope that a simpler, easier-to-replicate cure could be coming, the outlet said.