Jeff Sheehy is director for communications at the AIDS Research Institute at UCSF, and a member of the CIRM governing board.
Two articles in major newspapers—the New York Times and London's Financial Times—are highlighting the growing movement advocating for research towards a cure for HIV in the lead up to World AIDS Day on December 1.
Advocacy for a cure has been sparked in recent years by the experience of Timothy Ray Brown, the first patient cured of HIV. It has been five years since his dangerous and high-risk procedure that also cured his leukemia and his virus remains undetectable. More recently, a patient who had some of his disease fighting T-cells re-engineered with a HIV-resistant gene is showing preliminary signs of having virus suppression without antiretroviral medications for a significant period of time. (We blogged about that work here.)
Despite these successes let's be clear, a cure is still many years off and will require the active participation of patients motivated by altruism—as my friend Nelson Vergel has noted, heroes for the cure are needed. As Vegel writes, “No one really knows the degree of altruism in the community and their willingness to accept risks for the good of all.”
But recent data from UNAIDS shows us that those heroes for the cure and the cures themselves are desperately needed. While the number of new HIV infections has stabilized and the number of deaths due to AIDS is decreasing, we are seeing two new infections for every one person we manage to get into treatment globally. We are still losing ground against the epidemic.
And in the U.S., the federal Centers for Disease Control announced this week that only about a quarter of the 1.1 million people in the U.S. living with HIV have been successfully treated with antiretrovirals to a point to where they have suppressed the virus in their bodies to very low levels.
A cure is the best way to permanently change these statistics.
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, of which I am a board member representing HIV/AIDS, has provided historic leadership in funding future cures. The first applications were accepted for blood and immune system stem cell (hematopoietic stem cells) gene therapy projects to permanently re-engineer a person's immune system to resist HIV almost 4 years ago. Two awards were approved two years ago (one to City of Hope and one to UCLA) and should be in clinical trials within another 2-3 years. The challenge of replicating Timothy's daring proof of concept experiment in a much safer and much more scalable manner was taken up by CIRM while the head of NIH's HIV/AIDS programs was pooh-poohing the approach as ''not practicable." He has now embraced the call for a cure and it has become one of his top research priorities.
When California voters approved Proposition 71 seven years ago, none of us knew where the science might lead. And one cannot promise a specific cure for HIV or any other disease. However, I know that the existence of CIRM has greatly helped to change the research agenda for HIV globally and I suspect this is true for many other diseases and conditions.
CIRM, the California stem cell institute, does not propose temporary or episodic relief from disease, pain and suffering. We are committed to finding cures and we are working towards them relentlessly in partnership with patients, researchers and industry across California. This year on World AIDS Day, 30 long years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, CIRM is a beacon of hope.
This video features Jeff Sheehy and CIRM disease team leader talking about a CIRM-funded project for HIV/AIDS:
J.S.
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