Paris - (AFP) - A few patients have benefited from the extraordinary opportunity of being cured of the HIV virus that causes AIDS , but these cases are too isolated to allow the development of treatments that would lead to a cure. Complete elimination of the virus.

"I never imagined that I would live long enough to be cured of HIV," said one of these patients, who was declared cured on Wednesday, ahead of the International AIDS Conference in Montreal.

This patient, who published a statement about his condition from inside a hospital in California where he was being treated without revealing his identity, is the fourth or fifth person to be cured of HIV, according to different censuses.

Therefore, these cases are very rare. These people must be distinguished from the millions of patients infected with AIDS but who can live to an average life expectancy thanks to the existence of effective treatments.

These treatments, called antiretrovirals, prevent HIV from multiplying in the body, but they do not eliminate it completely. However, in the few cases that have proven treatment, it is possible to talk about the disappearance of the virus.

The first of these healings dates back to 2008, to a person said to be from Berlin. The penultimate patient, who was declared cured a few months ago, was treated in New York.

But these patients all have a very specific joint condition. They were suffering from blood cancers and benefited from a stem cell transplant that rejuvenated their immune systems.

The patients who recovered were lucky, as the donors had in their cases a rare mutation in a gene called CCR5 that makes the immune system resistant to the main strains of the "HIV" virus.

In the most recent recovery reported so far, the patient from California underwent a bone marrow transplant in 2019. Two years later, he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, as the HIV in his body became undetectable.

This case is very interesting because the 66-year-old man, who has been infected with HIV for more than thirty years, is the oldest patient to be declared cured. This shows that stem cell transplantation therapy can benefit relatively elderly people.

But this observation remains largely theoretical because it is unreasonable to generalize such treatment to patients with some types of cancer.

"For most people living with HIV, this is not an option," said infectious disease specialist Jana Decter, who treated this patient and will present his case at the Montreal conference, pending independent review of this scientific work and its publication in a scientific journal.

It is known that stem cell transplantation, which is done mostly through the bone marrow, is a heavy course with significant side effects.

"The first effect of a bone marrow transplant is to temporarily destroy the immune system," researcher Stephen Dix, an HIV specialist who was not involved in the work, told AFP.

He added that such a risk is "unthinkable for anyone who does not suffer from cancer."

Dix, who will present in Montreal important advances in the way HIV-infected cells are identified, said the California patient, like his predecessors, provides interesting clues for one day finding a treatment that would allow for a full recovery.

He pointed out that such a treatment could be based on the "CRISPR" technology, which is a method of genetic manipulation that is one of the great scientific achievements in recent years.
The idea is to directly modify the CCR5 genes of infected patients to make the body resistant to HIV.
"Theoretically, this is possible," he concluded, "but for now, this is science fiction."