It seems as though a bright spot for a potential cure for AIDS will be dimmed for now.
According to the Boston Globe, two patients who showed promising signs of recovering from AIDS following a bone marrow transplant are showing signs of the virus resurfacing.
Lead researcher Dr. Timothy Henrich, of Brigham and Women's Hospital, said the AIDS virus is proving its persistence and its ability to avoid certain treatments. He and a team of researchers will now use newfound scientific evidence to further develop a treatment or cure for AIDS.
Henrich presented the team's initial findings in Florida on Tuesday at an AIDS research conference. He said he and his research team identified the virus in the two patients who had seemingly recovered earlier. Both patients had received bone marrow transplants several years ago to treat cancer and had stopped taking their retroviral medication. Such medication is highly powerful and used to stop the effects of AIDS, not eliminate it.
Now their findings will be released before the team finalizes their result analysis in order to give access to other researchers.
"We felt it would be scientifically unfair to not let people know how things are going, especially for potential patients," Henrich told the Globe.
The two HIV patients agreed to participate in the study that was meant to determine if the medication was keeping the virus at bay or if the donor bone marrow cells were fighting the AIDS. The two stopped taking the medication and the signs of the virus began to disappear, suggesting the bone marrow transplant was eliminating the AIDS.
They spent eight months with no signs of HIV before it came back, resulting in the patients being put back on medication.
"This suggests that we need to look deeper, or we need to be looking in other tissues... the liver, gut, and brain," Henrich said. "These are all potential sources, but it's very difficult to obtain tissue from these places so we don't do that routinely."
