Transcription
When I found out I was HIV positive, I wasn't upset. I was terrified. Saying "I have HIV" is something big. It changes your life.
Taking antiretroviral treatments is not a desired option. They have all their side effects on our body functions. They're very expensive. That is especially limiting in resource-poor settings. Of course, take for instance, Loto, where $25 are assigned per person per year for healthcare. You can imagine that adequate care for HIV infection is just absolutely impossible.
But there may now be an alternative. Medical researchers have developed a therapeutic vaccine that could defeat HIV. Unlike conventional vaccines, which prevent disease, a therapeutic vaccine helps equip infected bodies to defeat a disease that's already been contracted. Around 1% of the population have innate immunity to HIV. Their bodies can fight the disease without the need for drugs. We wanted to help people to become this normally only 1% that can deal with the infection without taking drugs. And so, what we wanted to achieve is really what we call a functional cure. A functional cure is where the patient doesn't suffer any of the problems associated with HIV, but there may still be traces of the virus in his or her system.
HIV infects some of a person's white blood cells that normally help protect the body against illness. Once the immune system is compromised, an infected person is at risk of dying from such diseases as tuberculosis, pneumonia, or the flu. HIV is so hard to treat because it is usually hidden from the body's own defense system in otherwise healthy-looking cells. To kill it requires a two-step process. Firstly, the vaccine boosts a patient's immune system so it is better able to fight the virus. Then, the patient is given a drug called romidepsin, which causes the HIV-infected white blood cells to release proteins on their surfaces, identifying them to the body. The patient's white blood cells, boosted by the vaccine, are thus able to find and destroy these HIV-infected cells.
A group of scientists ran trials of the vaccine on 13 people who had recently contracted HIV with the aim of helping their immune systems find HIV-infected cells and destroy them. Once the patients received the vaccine, they stopped taking their anti-retroviral treatment and began taking rson to see whether their immune systems could defeat the disease. And the results were encouraging. Five out of the 13 individuals can control the virus. For this 40% of the trial participants, it's been life-changing, including patient A5.
When I was first told that the treatment had worked and it was undetectable, it was brilliant. Since I have had the vaccine, I haven't had to take any pills or any meds for six months. It's not a complete cure, so everything is fine. I'm thrilled. I don't know what side effects I might have from taking this treatment. I'm thrilled, but I'm always expecting the worst.
Over the next years, we will see certainly a number of trials of therapeutic vaccination going on here and in many other places in the world. We need to hope that we can induce a functional cure in a large proportion of these individuals and take them off antiretroviral treatment. But this does not mean we have won against HIV and we have eradicated that virus from the face of the Earth. These people are still infected. The challenge is to really achieve eradication of the virus, and only then can we start thinking of getting rid of HIV and making it a history.