produce HIV and to come out of hiding. It is also thought that the nicotinamide may be able to activate cells in the immune system that specialize in killing HIV infected cells. He received the experimental treatments for a year and then continued on standard therapy for another two years, and then stopped all therapy.
The first hint that this experiment was effective is that after the patient stopped taking medicine, his virus remained undetectable. As we mentioned above, in most people suppressed on therapy, virus reappears in the blood after the medicines are stopped. Not in this case. Other tests showed the presence of virus in latently infected cells declined throughout the treatment and could not be detected after treatment was stopped. This is what you would expect to find in a person with no virus in the blood after stopping their medicine. Also, the amount of circulating HIV antibodies in the blood gradually decreased over the course of the study treatment. But what is unique in this case is that the HIV antibodies remained very low after the patient stopped taking medicines, indicating very little or no virus around to stimulate antibody production.
At the time that this case was presented at the conference in early July, the patient had been off all medicines for over 64 weeks with no virus detected in the blood or anywhere else. So the key questions now are, can this patient remain “virus free”? In other words, is he truly cured? Importantly, can other patients get the same benefit from this approach? Time will tell. Stay tuned!