Second HIV-positive baby may be cured of AIDS
Doctors announced that they may have possibly cured a second baby born with AIDS by administering antiretroviral treatment within hours after birth.
Doctors revealed on Wednesday that the baby was in remission from the virus at an AIDS conference in Boston. The girl was born in suburban Los Angeles last April, a month after researchers announced the first case of a possible cure, a baby from Mississippi. The Mississippi case was a medical first that led doctors worldwide to rethink how fast and hard to treat infants born with HIV, and the California doctors followed that example.
In another AIDS-related development, scientists have modified genes in the blood cells of a dozen adults to help them resist HIV. The results give hope that this approach might one day free at least some people from needing medicines to keep HIV under control, a form of cure. That study was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
The Mississippi baby is now 3 1/2 and seems HIV-free despite no treatment for about two years. The Los Angeles baby is still getting AIDS medicines, so the status of her infection is not as clear.
A host of sophisticated tests at multiple times suggest the LA baby has completely cleared the virus, said Dr. Deborah Persaud, a Johns Hopkins University physician who led the testing. The baby's signs are different from what doctors see in patients whose infections are merely suppressed by successful treatment, she said.
"We don't know if the baby is in remission ... but it looks like that," said Dr. Yvonne Bryson, an infectious disease specialist at Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA who consulted on the girl's care.
Doctors are cautious about suggesting she has been cured, "but that's obviously our hope," Bryson said.
Most HIV-infected moms in the U.S. get AIDS medicines during pregnancy, which greatly cuts the chances they will pass the virus to their babies. The Mississippi baby's mom received no prenatal care and her HIV was discovered during labor. Doctors started the baby on treatment 30 hours after birth, even before tests could determine whether she was infected.
The California baby was born at Miller Children's Hospital Long Beach, and "we knew this mother from a previous pregnancy" and that she was not taking her HIV medicines, said Dr. Audra Deveikis, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the hospital.
The mom was given AIDS drugs during labor to try to prevent transmission of the virus, and Deveikis started the baby on them just four hours after birth. Tests later confirmed she had been infected, but does not appear to be now, nearly a year later.
The baby is continuing treatment, is in foster care "and looking very healthy," Bryson said.
The Mississippi girl was treated until she was 18 months old, when doctors lost contact with her. Ten months later when she returned, they could find no sign of infection even though the mom had stopped giving her AIDS medicines.
Bryson is one of the leaders of a federally funded study just getting underway to see if very early treatment can cure HIV infection. About 60 babies in the U.S. and other countries will get very aggressive treatment that will be discontinued if tests over a long time, possibly two years, suggest no active infection.
"These kids obviously will be followed very, very closely" for signs of the virus, said Persaud, who described the LA case at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
Brown said in 2012 that he has not taken his HIV medication since his transplant. Despite the fact that researchers found traces of HIV in his tissue samples, he claims the virus remnants are dead and cannot replicate.
Two other HIV positive patients in Boston were reportedly "cured" after they received a stem cell transplant to treat their blood cancers in July 2013. The donors did not have the natural immunity to HIV. In early 2014, doctors said that the patients had relapsed and had to start taking antiretroviral treatments once again.
A promising vaccine has also cleared the monkey version of HIV from infected monkeys, but more work has to be done before this treatment can be used on humans.
HIV usually infects blood T cells through a protein on their surface called CCR5. A California company, Sangamo BioSciences Inc., makes a treatment that can knock out a gene that makes CCR5.
Dr. Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania tested it in 12 HIV patients who had their blood filtered to remove some of their cells. The treated cells were infused back into the patients.
Four weeks later, half of the patients were temporarily taken off AIDS medicines to see the gene therapy's effect. The virus returned in all but one of them; that patient turned out to have one copy of the protective gene.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sponsored the work with Sangamo and Penn.
"The ultimate goal is to create an immune system in the body that's been edited genetically so the cells are not capable of being infected with HIV," said director Dr. Anthony Fauci, "but we are a long way from there at this point."
Jay Johnson, 53, who works for Action AIDS, an advocacy and service organization in Philadelphia, had the treatment more than three years ago. Although the virus rebounded when he temporarily went off HIV medicines, tests show his modified blood cells are still multiplying.
"Hopefully one day I'll be able to say I'm HIV negative again," he said.