Can an AIDS infection be cured?
Doctors may know soon, when the results of a landmark study start to emerge.Using a powerful new combination of medicines, they are treating nine men from almost the first days of their HIV infections to learn if they can completely and permanently wipe out every last trace of the virus.
The plan is to keep up treatment for a year or so, then stop the drugs and see if the virus is gone for good.
"We are treading in an area where no one has tread before," Dr. Martin Markowitz of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City said Thursday.
Clearly, no one knows if this will work. And some significant hurdles remain, including the possibility that bits of the virus will lurk deep where drugs cannot reach.
Nevertheless, the doctors believe this experiment on newly infected men will give them a better idea whether it is possible to eradicate the virus once it becomes established.
So far, all traces of virus have vanished from the men's blood. Their blood counts are returning to normal, and they have stopped producing AIDS antibodies.
"These data are very encouraging and absolutely crucial to going ahead," said Dr. Joep Lange of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam.
Key to the therapy is a combination of two older AIDS medicines plus a new class called protease inhibitors. Many experiments are under way with different blends of these drugs, and several preliminary reports have been presented here at the 11th International Conference on AIDS.
The combinations can eliminate all measurable traces of HIV in the blood even when given to people who have been infected for several years. However, many doubt this approach will kill every trace of the virus after a long infection, especially if it has burrowed into the brain and other parts of the body that are hard to reach with drugs.