Brazilian study seeking to cure HIV will resume by year-end 2021
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The head of the research group that eliminated the virus from the “São Paulo patient” reports that the new phase of studies is expected to begin at the end of the year.
The researcher and infectiologist at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Ricardo Sophie Diaz, intends to begin the new phase of clinical trials with the treatment that eliminated HIV that causes AIDS in a resident of São Paulo.
In this new phase, the team led by Diaz will increase the number of participants in the clinical trial to 70, with 60 volunteers receiving the new treatment with the drug combination and another 10 forming a control group.
“We already have the funding, we have the approval, we just haven’t started it yet because of the pandemic,” the researcher explains.
In the first phase of the study, the results of which were announced in July 2020, the researchers presented the case of the “patient from São Paulo.” The volunteer – a 36-year-old man who does not want to be named – was considered cured after HIV disappeared from his blood samples.
THIRD CASE IN THE WORLD
The “patient from Sao Paulo” is the third registered case of HIV cure in the world. The scientific community has recognized two other cases: Timothy Ray Brown, the “Berlin Patient,” in Germany, and Adam Castillejo, the “London Patient,” in England. Both patients underwent bone marrow transplants and were freed from the AIDS virus.
In the Brazilian case, the scientists had observed 30 volunteers who had a very low HIV viral load and therefore did not transmit the disease, but underwent standard treatment with available cocktails. The “São Paulo patient” who was part of this first group received intensive treatment combining the traditional drug cocktail with nicotinamide.
“The biggest obstacle for us to cure these patients is when the virus enters a dormant state. Researchers all over the world are looking for drugs that will reverse the latency of the virus. We discovered that nicotinamide wakes up the virus; we saw this in the lab and used it in the clinical trial,” Diaz explains.
The scientists developed a treatment strategy that combined two types of drugs. The goal was to awaken the virus, bring it out of its latent state, and then eliminate it. In addition to nicotinamide, which reverses latency, auranofin, which destroys the infected cell, was used.
NUMBER OF INFECTED
In December 2020, the Brazilian Ministry of Health published the HIV/AIDS epidemiological bulletin, which showed that between 2012 and 2019, there was an 18.7% decrease in the HIV infection rate in the country.
The figures were collected between 2009 and 2019. In addition, it was reported that the mortality rate of the disease decreased by 17.1%, with 12,667 deaths recorded in 2015 and 10,565 in 2019.
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