In a NYTimes Op-Ed piece, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and president-elect of the International AIDS Society, summarizes important issues about the search for a cure in modern times.
Over the past 30 years, important advances have been made in scientists' understanding of this disease. Some of the avenues of investigation include:
- treatment as prevention concept -- using highly active therapy early in the disease
- functional cure concept -- the long-term remission of patients with a very efficient and persistent control of H.I.V. after discontinuation of treatment
- H.I.V. reservoirs -- the virus hides and persists in the body
- elite controllers -- those exceptional people who are infected with H.I.V. for over a decade, do not take treatment, yet do not develop AIDS
- vaccine therapy
- proof of concept - a patient who underwent a stem-cell bone-marrow transplant for leukemia is now cured of his AIDS
- gene therapy -- provocative studies with a specific receptor gene on which H.I.V. depends to invade host cells
"A cure will require funding commitments, strong community engagement, rigorous and innovative scientific endeavor and, above all, further collaborative multidisciplinary science with a better connection between basic and clinical research — in short, all the same ingredients that got us where we are today with the global antiretroviral treatment."
We're getting closer to finding and developing answers for AIDS, answers that will surely provide insight into other diseases, too.
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