the use of cancer chemotherapy and radiation that may have eliminated HIV from hiding in cells and tissues, but also the use of immunosuppressive medicines to keep the transplanted cells from being rejected may have somehow contributed.
What should be emphasized here that the procedures these patients went through can be risky and potentially dangerous and were undertaken to save these men from their cancers. Thankfully, their medical teams were successful in doing that and also possibly curing their HIV infection. These procedures are not recommended in any way for routine treatment of HIV. But these cases do shed light on possible ways that we could successfully target the virus and hopefully cure the infection and may lead us to methods that can we used more widely and safely. At least these cases teach us that the virus is NOT invincible.
The next article will bring some more new finding from CROI 2019.
Dr. Crawford has over 25 years of experience in the treatment of HIV. While at Howard University School of Medicine, he worked in two HIV-specialty clinics at Howard University Hospital. He then did clinical research as a visiting scientist with the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He served as the Assistant Chief of Public Health Research with the Military HIV Research Program where he managed research studies under the President’s Emergency Plan for AID Relief (PEPFAR) in four African countries.
He is currently working in the Division of AIDS in the National Institutes of Health. He has published research in the leading infectious diseases journals and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal AIDS. Any views and perspectives in his articles on blackdoctor.org are not representative of any agency or organization but a reflection of his personal views.