Doctors have made a landmark breakthrough in the treatment of HIV after they ‘cured’ a baby with the virus.
The baby girl had been infected by her mother who was diagnosed as HIV positive during labour.
Because of the high infection risk, the baby was given an accelerated programme of medication.
She received three standard HIV drugs instead of the usual one when she was just 30-hours old.
This appears to have blasted the virus into remission and prevented it from taking root in the baby’s cells.
Now two-years-old, the girl from Mississipi is in remission with blood tests showing no signs that the virus is present. This is known as a ‘functional cure.’
Experts say the groundbreaking development paves the way for other children to be treated before the virus takes hold.
Last night at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, the case was declared a major landmark in the battle to find a cure for the disease.
Study leader Dr Deborah Persaud, of Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre in Baltimore, said the toddler is now free from the potentially fatal disease.
Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said: ‘You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we’ve seen.’
He added that the child, which is only the second patient ever recorded to have been ‘cured’ of AIDS, ‘opens up a lot of doors’ for the treatment of other children born with HIV.
The child’s mother was rushed to a rural emergency room in July 2010 in advanced labour and tests showed she was HIV positive.
Because the mother had not had any treatment, doctors knew the child was at high risk of infection.
Normally, they would have given the newborn a low dose of the medication nevirapine in the hope that it would prevent the HIV from taking hold.
However the small hospital didn’t have the right kind of liquid to give the treatment and so she was rushed to specialist centre run by Dr Hannah Gay, a paediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississipi.
Because of her high risk, Dr Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three HIV-fighting drugs – the typical nevirapine alongside zidovudine (also known as AZT), lamivudine – when she was just 30 hours old.
Dr Gay explained that because the baby’s mother didn’t know she had the virus her baby did not get the prenatal care normally given to babies at high-risk of inheriting the disease.
She said: ‘I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot.’
The child responded well up to the age of 18 months, when the family temporarily stopped attending the hospital and stopped treatment, researchers said.
When they returned several months later, remarkably, Dr Gay’s standard tests detected no virus in the child’s blood.
A battery of super-sensitive tests at half a dozen laboratories also found no sign of the virus’ return. There were only some remnants of genetic material that don’t appear able to replicate.
Because there is no detectible virus in the child’s blood, the team has advised that she not be given antiretroviral therapy, whose goal is to block the virus from replicating in the blood. Instead, she will be monitored closely.
She said: ‘We can’t promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy.’
Two years after beginning the treatment and tests have shown no virus in the child’s blood, it has now been off medication for almost a year with no further signs of infection.
There is no guarantee that the baby will remain disease free, but early signs do look positive.
Experts believe that giving such an intense dose of HIV drugs so quickly apparently knocked out HIV in the baby’s blood before it could form hideouts in the body.
Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of John Hopkins Children’s Center.
She led the investigation that deemed the child ‘functionally cured,’ meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven’t been completely eradicated.
Dr Gay added: ‘I just check for the virus and keep praying that it stays gone.’
The mother’s HIV is being controlled with medication and she is ‘quite excited for her child,’ she added.
The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different – a bone marrow transplant from a special donor who was naturally resistant to HIV.
Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.
Daily mail.co.uk