Hours after their births, 34 infants began a three-drug combination HIV treatment. Now, 2 years later, nearly a third of those toddlers have tested negative for HIV antibodies and have no detectable HIV DNA in their blood. The children aren't cured of HIV, but as many as 16 of them may be candidates to stop treatment and see if they are in fact in HIV remission.
If one or more are, it would be the first time since the Mississippi baby in 2013 that scientists had induced childhood HIV remission by beginning HIV treatment very early.
At the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections 2022 (CROI 2022), Deborah Persaud, MD, interim director of pediatric infectious diseases and professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, told Medscape Medical News that the evidence suggests that more US clinicians should start infants at high risk for HIV on presumptive treatment — not only to potentially prevent transmission, but also to set the child up for the lowest possible viral reservoir, the first step to HIV remission.
The three-drug preemptive treatment is "not uniformly practiced," Persaud told Medscape Medical News"We're at a point now where we don't have to wait to see if we have remission" to act on these findings, she said. "The question is, should this now become standard of care for in-utero infected infants?"
