How Feasible Is HIV Eradication?

Undoubtedly the major topic of discussion at the XI International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver this month was the possibility that HIV might be eradicated from an individual given sufficiently potent antiretroviral therapy for a long enough time.

Researchers at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, USA, under the guidance of David Ho, have taken it upon themselves to test the feasibility of this approach. At the conference, Prof Ho presented an elegant and well-received mathematical model, taking into account what is known about the pathogenesis of HIV infection, which suggests that providing viral replication can be completely suppressed, a minimum of one to three years' treatment would be required to eliminate HIV from the various compartments of the body.

This concept has now moved firmly into the testing stage. Martin Markowitz, a staff investigator at Aaron Diamond, presented the results of a preliminary study in which 12 subjects newly-infected with HIV were treated with a three-drug regimen involving Glaxo Wellcome's reverse transcriptase inhibitors zidovudine and lamivudine and Abbott Laboratories' protease inhibitor ritonavir.