2010: The Year the Tide Turned Against AIDS?

Earlier this winter German doctors announced that a man who had been given a bone-marrow transplant had been HIV-free for three years. Last month, a drug used to contain HIV was shown to also prevent its spread from person to person. Meanwhile there may be a blueprint for a vaccine, more people are getting tested than ever, the Pope has loosened his stance on condom use just slightly enough to give experts a sliver of hope that contraception distribution will be easier, and a new breed of anti-AIDS activists puts increasing pressure on the government to act with urgency.

There’s a long way to go, and the stigma of HIV lingers, but it looks as though the tide may have finally turned against this persistent disease.

 Medical Breakthroughs

The most recent breakthrough came from Germany, when doctors announced that thanks to stem cells (ahem, right-wingers), they had successfully reduced a man’s HIV levels to undetectable, even going so far as to use the word “,” as MSNBC reported:

In 2007, the man received a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia. The transplant — which treats leukemia by essentially rebooting the body's immune system and creating new white blood cells —also had the benefit of wiping out the HIV infection. Now, three and a half years later, the patient remains HIV-free, which suggests he is cured of the disease, the researchers said.

While many scientists suggested caution at the word “cure,” as the disease might remain undetectably, there was no question throughout the community that the findings were heartening. Furthermore, finding a donor with the right kind of rare irregularities that helped rid this test subject of the disease is no easy thing--it’s a 1% occurrence in Northern Europe. But there’s hope that gene therapy--an experimental, cutting-edge technique which would potentially work by “inserting a gene into a patient’s cells instead of using drugs or surgery”--can replicate the results of the marrow donation.

This case study, which was initially published last year in the New England Journal of Medecine and then confirmed in the journal Blood, comes on the heels of another promising study. The second study posits that Truvadia, an antiretroviral currently used to contain HIV in infected patients, can actually help prevent the spread of the disease when taken daily by healthy gay men. This second study, also published in the New England Journal, showed that the men who took the pill daily--without skipping or forgetting--were 73% less likely to contract the disease than those who didn’t.

The drug needs to go through further rounds of testing to see if it has similar beneficial effects for women and heterosexual men, and even then, would only be considered one aspect of a wide of methods for protection (e.g along with condom use and frequent testing). But it’s still heartening, Dr. Anthony Fauci, The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, which sponsored the Truvadia study explained the upshot to NPR in November, saying, “we now have a potentially new tool in our armamentarium of preventive measures, which must be always considered as a multifaceted, comprehensive approach to prevention. But this is a very important weapon now we have in that approach...”

These cutting-edge medical breakthroughs won’t have a major impact on society for months or even years, but at least they’re finally being made.  Two other major breakthroughs this year were outlined by TheBody.com's editor-in-chief Kellee Terrell in the Huffington Post:

...the discovery of two rare human antibodies that kill 90 percent of all HIV strains, which could provide the basis for a vaccine. The first-ever successful clinical trial of a microbicide, which could bring us one step closer to women being able to have more control over their sexual health.