A 66-year-old man in Southern California and a woman in her 70s in Spain are the latest in a small group of people who appear to have beaten their HIV infections, providing researchers new clues to a possible cure at a time when Covid-19 and other crises are slowing progress against the spreading virus.
Doctors caring for the man said they haven’t found any human immunodeficiency virus that can replicate in his body since he stopped antiretroviral drug therapy in March 2021 after a transplant of stem cells containing a rare genetic mutation that blocks HIV infection.
He is the oldest of five patients thus far who appear to have rid their bodies of HIV after the risky procedure and had been infected the longest, since 1988, offering hope for a growing cohort of aging HIV patients, said Jana Dickter, an infectious disease doctor who cares for the man at City of Hope, a cancer research and treatment center in Duarte, Calif., in the Los Angeles area.
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Finding a cure for HIV is a major scientific challenge because even when reduced to low levels with medication, the virus can hide from the body’s immune system, going latent in certain cells. It can then roar back to life and start replicating.
