Since 1996, when triple therapy was introduced, people with the AIDS virus no longer die, some patients are even cured following a transplant, others, treated very early, are able to control their infection naturally. … Examples that give hope that therapeutic avenues can lead from remission to recovery.
A few weeks ago, American scientists announced thata neat woman in new york, who has leukemia, was cured of AIDS after receiving umbilical cord blood stem cells. Before her, three patients in Berlin, London and Düsseldorf had also been presented as cured, after a bone marrow transplant intended to treat their cancer.
This transplant from a compatible donor, whose cells were HIV resistant, actually replaced the infected patient’s blood cells and rebuilt a new immune system. Have we finally found a treatment to cure the human immunodeficiency virus? In no case, because these are heavy operations, impossible to replicate on a large scale.
Since the HIV virus was isolated in 1983 by the team of Françoise Barré-Fitoussi and Luc Montagnier, science has made giant strides. In 1996, the first tritherapies – a combination of three drugs – notably enabled AIDS patients to live with the virus more or less normally.
Triple therapy, a lifelong treatment
But, as the Sidaction weekend starts on Friday March 25, the organizers are upset that the health crisis continues to weaken activities in the fight against AIDS in France and abroad.
Fight against AIDS: progress compromised by the Covid-19 epidemic
And if tritherapies have the merit of existing, they are not insignificant. There is a higher risk of developing other diseases (cardiovascular, cancer, etc.), access problems, sometimes resistance to treatment, recalled mid-March Michaela Müller-Trutwinprofessor at the Institut Pasteur, on the sidelines of an ANRS-MIE symposium…
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