The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children

For years, Philip Golder was obsessed with a particularly captivating idea: to search for a HIV treatment, can children hold answers?

Starting in mid -2010, the pediatrician at the University of Oxford and the immunity specialist began working with scientists in the province of Kawazolo Natal, South Africa, with the aim of tracking several hundreds of children who acquired HIV from their mothers, either during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding.

After putting children on anti -viral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Golder and his colleagues were keen to monitor their progress and commitment to usual anti -virus treatment, preventing HIV from repetition. But during the next decade, something unusual happened. Five children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team finally followed them after several months, they seemed to be perfect health.

“Instead of its viral loads across the surface, it could not be discovered,” says Golder. “HIV usually returns within two or three weeks.”

In a study published last year, Golder described how the five remained in remission, although regular anti -virus drugs were not received for some time, in one case, up to 17 months. In decades -long research for a treatment for HIV, this made an exciting vision: The first widespread success in the treatment of HIV may not come in adults, but in children.

At the recent International AIDS conference held in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid -July, Alfredo Tajaro, a pediatrician at the Infanta Sophia University Hospital in Madrid, presented a new study showing that about 5 percent of children with HIV who receives the viruses full of cells. “Children have special immunity features that make it likely to develop a HIV treatment for them before the other population,” Tajaro says.

His ideas were repeated by another doctor, Mark Couton, who directs the Clinical Research Unit for Children’s Children’s University of Stellinbush, Cape Town.

“Children have a more dynamic immune system,” says Couton. “They also don’t have any additional problems such as high blood pressure or kidney problems. It makes them a better target, at first, to treat.”

According to Tagarro, children with HIV “have left behind” a long time in the race to find a treatment that can permanently put individuals with HIV in remission. Since 2007, 10 adults were believed to have been treated, after they have received stem cell transplants to treat life -threatening leukemia, a procedure that ended up eliminating the virus. However, with such complex and very risky procedures – other patients died in the wake of similar attempts – it is not considered a viable strategy to target HIV specifically.

Instead, like Gullder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting an early -life anti -virus treatment, it seems that a small sub -population group of children is able to suppress HIV for several months, and perhaps even with the immune system alone. This perception started initially with some isolated case studies: “Mesissippi” who dominated the virus for more than two years without medication, and the South African child who was likely to be treated with a virus in forgiveness for more than a decade. Cotton says that between 10 and 20 percent of all children with HIV will be able to control the virus for a large period of time, after two to three weeks, after anti -virus stopped.