Can HIV Be Eliminated?

In the Bernard Fields Memorial Lecture at the 4th Conference onRetroviruses and Opportunistic Infections held in Washington DC, USA, David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City, USA, and a leader in the field of HIV and AIDS research, answered the question "can HIV be eradicated from an infected person?" with the reply: "we don't know."

At the AIDS conference in Vancouver, Canada last year, Dr Ho suggested that if viral replication could be completely suppressed, using a cocktail of protease inhibitors and the older nucleoside drugs, then theoretically one to three years of treatment might eliminate HIV from parts of the body where it is usually found (Marketletter July 22, 1996).

At the Washington DC meeting, Dr Ho presented results from trials with 12 HIV-positive male patients treated with Glaxo Wellcome's Epivir (lamivudine) and Retrovir (zidovudine) plus either Merck's Crixivan (indinavir) or Abbott's Norvir (ritonavir). He found that although patients had no detectable viral RNA in their seminal cells, HIV DNA was present in all patient sperm samples, although it was not determined whether the proviral DNA was infectious.