In Mississippi nearly two years ago, a mother infected with AIDS gave birth to an HIV-positive baby.
Dr. Hannah Gay, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Mississippi Medical center, administered high doses of three anti-viral drugs to the baby shortly after it was born because the mother had received no prenatal HIV treatment.
Doctors continued to give the baby anti-viral treatments for the first 18 months of its life.
Then, the mother and baby disappeared. When the mom returned to doctors, she admitted that she hadn’t given the baby, now a toddler, HIV medication for the past five months.
Expecting to find that the child had large quantities of HIV in its bloodstream, Dr. Gay instead discovered the child was HIV-free. After 10 months, the child was pronounced “functionally cured” of AIDS.
Shocked, Dr. Gay contacted researchers from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and from the University of Massachusetts. After further analysis, the researchers found the same results that Dr. Gay had found. The child was indeed HIV-free.
Dr. Deborah Persaud presented the research findings at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections earlier this week.
Drug companies were also quick to take credit for the findings. GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer formed a company called ViiV Healthcare in 2009 with the mission of addressing the global AIDS crisis. ViiV sells two of the drugs used to treat the baby: lamivudine and zidovudine.
Researchers credited the timing of the treatment rather than the drugs for the positive outcome.
Dr. Persaud said the researchers were working to create ethical tests that could determine whether more infants born with HIV could be cured. But discontinuing medication to see whether the viral load remains low could carry significant risks for the child.
The virus could resurface and mutate, for example, which would make treatment even more difficult.
Before the Mississippi toddler, the only person ever cured of AIDS was Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient.” Brown was cured after a bone marrow transplant, which supplied him with white blood cells containing a genetic mutation that made them resistant to HIV.
Other cases of bone marrow transplants in Boston, MA in the last few years have set similar precedents for an official cure in the foreseeable future.
Bone marrow transplants carry too many dangers to become a treatment standard for HIV. However, early drug administration to HIV-positive babies could save innocent children from a lifetime of living with AIDS.
Edited by
Braden Becker
