HIV ‘cure’ setback
Hopes that treating newborn HIV+ babies with drugs could cure the infection have suffered a major setback, according the the journal Nature. Researchers hoped that if they treated babies early, they could prevent the build up of reservoirs of the virus in the gut and brain.
Their optimism was based on a girl known as the Missippi Baby. She was treated with anti-retrovirals as soon as she was born, then the drugs were stopped after 18 months. Unfortunately, the virus re-emerged years later.
Today’s report in Nature says that research on monkeys has shown that the reservoirs of virus form even earlier than previously believed.
Report here: http://tinyurl.com/k7taw44