02 Sep HIV: how close are we to a vaccine — or a cure?

By Diana Kwon, nature

At a major HIV conference in July, scientists announced that a seventh person had been ‘cured’ of the disease. A 60-year-old man in Germany, after receiving a stem-cell transplant, has been free of the virus for almost six years, researchers reported.

The first such instance of eliminating HIV from a person in this way was reported in 2008. But stem-cell transplants, despite being highly effective at ridding people of the virus, are not a scalable strategy. The treatment is aggressive and poses risks, including long-term complications from graft-versus-host disease — a condition in which donor cells attack the recipient’s own tissues. The procedure was only possible in the seven successfully treated people because all of them had cancers that required a bone-marrow transplant, says Sharon Lewin, an infectious-diseases physician who heads the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia. “We would never even contemplate this for someone who was otherwise healthy,” Lewin says. “No one is thinking about this as a cure for HIV.” Read more…