Philip over the years Gaulder was obsessed with a particularly captivating idea: in search of a cure for HIV, can children have answers?
Starting from mid-2010, a pediatrician and immunologist from the University of Oxford began cooperation with scientists in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, in order to track several hundred children who acquired HIV from their mothers, or during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding.
After the introduction of children on anti -network drugs in their lives in order to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues eagerly monitored their progress and compliance with standard antiretroviral treatment, which prevents HIV from replication. But in the next decade something unusual happened. Five children stopped coming to the clinic to collect medicine, and when the team eventually tracked them many months later, they seemed to be in perfect health.
“Instead of their viral loads through the roof were undetectable,” says Goulder. “Usually HIV collections within two or three weeks.”
IN Study published last yearGoulder described how all five remained in remission, despite the fact that for some time they did not receive regular antiretroviral drugs, and in one case up to 17 months. During the decades of searching for medicine on HIV, this provided a tempting insight: that the first common success in the treatment of HIV may not occur in adults, but in children.
At the recent international conference of AIDS Society, which took place in Kigali in Rwanda, in mid -July, Alfredo Tagarro, a pediatrician at the Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, presented a modern study showing that about 5 percent of HIV -infected children who receive anti -reterstrucks during the first six months of life. horizontal. “Children have special immune features that increase the likelihood that we will develop a medicine for HIV before other populations,” says Tagarro.
His thoughts were repeated by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who manages children’s infectious diseases at the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town.
“Children have a much more dynamic immune system,” says Cotton. “They also have no additional problems, such as high blood pressure problems or kidney problems. This makes them a better goal, initially for medicine.”
According to Tagarro, children from HIV have long been “left” in the race to find treatment that can constantly lead people with HIV-Addatt. Since 2007, it is believed that 10 adults have been cured, receiving stem cell transplants in the treatment of life -threatening blood cancer, which eventually eliminated the virus. However, because such procedures are both elaborate and highly risky – other patients died after similar attempts – this is not considered a real strategy, in particular focused on HIV.
Instead, like Gaulder, pediatricians increasingly noticed that after starting antiretroviral treatment in an early period of life, a miniature subpopulation of children seems to be able to suppress HIV for months, years, and maybe even permanently with the immune system itself. This implementation initially began with some isolated cases: “Mississippi Baby” who controlled Virus for over two years without drugs, and a child from South Africa was considered potentially cured After keeping the virus in remission for over a decade. Cotton claims that he suspects that from 10 to 20 percent of all HIV -infected children would be able to control the virus for a significant period of time, exceeding the typical two to three weeks, after stopping anti -network.