The first broad treatment for HIV may be in children

For years, Philippe Gurder is particularly engrossed with enchanting ideas. Can children have an answer in search of HIV treatment?

Starting in the mid-2010s, pediatricians and immunologists at Oxford University began working with scientists from the state of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with the aim of tracking hundreds of children who had acquired HIV from their mothers during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.

After putting children in antiretroviral drugs to control the virus early in life, Gulder and his colleagues wanted to monitor the progress and adherence of standard antiretroviral treatments that HIV ceases replication. But over the next decade something unusual happened. They appeared to be in full health when five children came to the clinic and stopped collecting drugs and the team finally followed them months later.

“Instead of the virus load passing through the roof, they couldn’t detect it,” Gurder says. “And usually, HIV rebounds within two or three weeks.”

in Research published last yearGulder explained how all five of them were in remission despite not receiving regular antiretroviral medications for a while and in some cases up to 17 months. In decades of searching for HIV treatment, this provided appetite-inducing insights. The first broad success in curing HIV is that it may come to children rather than adults.

At the recent International AIDS Association Conference held in Kigali, Rwanda in mid-July, Alfredo Tagarro, a pediatrician at Infantasofia University Hospital in Madrid, published a new study showing that about 5% of HIV infected children who received antiretroviruses in the first six months had suppressed the material of HIV Viral reserve-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has-has At a level that can be ignored. “Children have special immunological characteristics, which makes them more likely to develop HIV treatments before other populations,” Tagaro says.

His thoughts were echoed by Mark Cotton, another doctor who directs the Children’s Infectious Disease Clinical Research Unit at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town.

“Children have a much more dynamic immune system,” says Cotton. “They also don’t have any additional issues like high blood pressure or kidney problems. They’re better targets at first for treatment.”

According to Tagaro, children with HIV have long been “lagged” in the race to find a treatment that could induce HIV-positive individuals to remission forever. Since 2007, 10 adults are believed to have been cured and have undergone stem cell transplants to treat life-threatening blood cancers. This is the procedure to eliminate the virus. However, such procedures are complex and extremely dangerous, and although other patients died in the aftermath of similar attempts, they are not considered a viable strategy for targeting HIV.

Instead, like Gulder, pediatricians are increasingly realising that after starting antiretroviral treatments early in life, a small subpopulation of children appears to be able to permanently suppress for months, years, and perhaps only by the immune system. This realization began with a specific isolated case study: “Mississippi Baby” Who controlled it? Virus for more than 2 years without medication, and South African children considered Potentially hardens He kept the virus in remission for over 10 years. Cotton says that between 10 and 20% of all HIV-infected children suspect that they can control the virus for quite some time, beyond the typical 2-3 weeks after stopping the antiretrovirus.