In the past 20 years, a handful of people have been cured of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS, through intensive medical procedures.
Several more people have received the treatment and also appear to be HIV-free, but it’s too soon to definitively declare these patients cured. For now, they’re described as being in long-term remission, and their cases are considered “possible” cures. All these patients received stem cell transplants, with cells collected either from adult bone marrow or from umbilical cord blood.
Scientists reported the first definitive HIV cure in 2008, and since then, two more definitive cures and two possible cures have been reported. The most recent reports of such cases — one definitive cure (opens in new tab) and one possible cure (opens in new tab) — came out in early 2023.
Experts say these treatments may become more common in upcoming years as scientists better understand them. However, for now, these treatments are risky and largely inaccessible to the tens of millions of people living with HIV worldwide. Thankfully, drugs for HIV, called antiretroviral therapies (ART), can greatly extend HIV-positive people’s lifespans and cut their risk of spreading the virus, but the medications must be taken daily and for life, can interact with other drugs (opens in new tab) and carry a small risk of serious side effects (opens in new tab).
So scientists hope these exceptional cure cases will pave the way to new, more-accessible treatment strategies that will rid more people of the virus.
Here’s what we know about curing HIV.
What treatments can cure HIV?
All of the people cured and potentially cured of HIV have been treated with stem cell transplants. In addition to being HIV-positive, all the patients had some form of cancer, specifically acute myeloid leukemia or Hodgkin’s lymphoma. These cancers affect white blood cells, a key component of the immune system, and can be treated with stem cell transplants.
To simultaneously treat these patients’ cancers and HIV, their doctors sought out stem cells from people with two copies of a rare genetic mutation: CCR5 delta 32. This mutation disables a protein on the cell surface called CCR5, which many HIV strains use to break into cells. The virus does this by first latching onto a different cell surface protein and changing shape; then, it grabs hold of CCR5 to invade the cell. Without CCR5, it’s essentially locked out.
(Some less-common HIV strains use a…
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