Emily’s amazing cure began when the chemotherapy she was undergoing to combat her cancer at the tender age of seven, stopped working. As a last resort, her doctors suggested a new experimental approach: an injection of the HIV retrovirus which had been re-engineered to attack cancer cells in place of immune system cells. As alternatives go, this one wasn’t without its risks and it made the little girl even more sick before she eventually recovered. But six months on, Emily is attending school again and is still cancer-free.
While Emily’s case seems miraculous, Timothy Brown’s is even more so. He had been HIV+ for eleven years when he developed leukaemia back in 2006. Like Emily, chemotherapy didn’t work and Brown was resigned to dying. That is until his doctor, Gero Hütter, a blood disease specialist, had the idea of treating Brown with a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a genetic mutation that is resistant to HIV. Not only did the transplant succeed, curing Brown of his leukaemia but six years later, Brown no longer shows evidence of HIV either.
A few years ago, another wonder occurred. A baby born in Mississippi with congenital HIV was cured within 30 hours of her birth after her doctors began aggressively treating her with antiretroviral drugs (ARV’s). Now three, she remains free of HIV. While doctors are not prepared to declare a cure for HIV/AIDS, let alone for leukaemia, these cases suggest that one day, a complete cure for both diseases may be possible.
I remember when the AIDS epidemic first began. It was a modern plague. Its victims were demonised and feared. It was also a death sentence. But by the time the first ARV’s were developed in the mid-90s, millions had died. Treatment was very expensive but for those who could afford it, ARVs transformed HIV from a death sentence into a chronic but manageable illness.
Since then, scientists, doctors, and public health professionals have continued to work on battling the epidemic. In recent years, due to the proliferation of generic versions of ARV’s, prices have gone down enormously, making these life-savers accessible to people living in low-income countries, where most of those infected live. At between USD 172 and USD 303 a year, treatment is still unaffordable to many of those affected, while most of the newer and more effective generation of ARV’s are still patented by pharmaceutical companies, making generic (read: affordable) production, impossible.
However, international health organisations and governments whose populations are hit hard by HIV/AIDS are taking innovative steps to curtail the rate of new infections and to provide affordable treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS. Happily, their efforts are paying off and the rates of new infections and AIDS-related deaths are declining worldwide.
As the international, scientific and humanitarian communities work tirelessly to find cures for cancer and HIV/AIDS, implausible-sounding treatments like using a modified version of the HIV virus to battle leukaemia may well become more and more common. We are closer today than ever to finding a cure and/or vaccine for cancer and HIV – a recent breakthrough by scientists working on immunotherapy in Britain is so promising, some are even predicting the end of cancer altogether —but until the cure finally comes, we must all ensure that people living with these diseases, now increasingly treatable, have access to the medicines that they deserve.
