UCSF researchers have found that some HIV patients treated with antiretroviral therapy early after infection do test negative, at some point, for the virus. Study findings showed this result in six of 87 patients.
"First, these patients are not cured. When these patients went off therapy, HIV virus levels rebounded. These results do show that with effective early treatment that reduces the virus to very low levels, the immune system may have less antibody response to HIV," said the study's lead author, C. Bradley Hare, MD, UCSF assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCSF's Positive Health Program (PHP) at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center.
The 87 patients who qualified for the study must have started antiretroviral therapy within 28 days of entry into the study. They also must have achieved and maintained for at least 24 weeks a level of virus in their blood below the level of detectability using very sensitive viral load testing. At some point during their follow-up, six patients tested negative for the HIV virus using standard HIV antibody tests.
Hare presented the study at the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand on July 12.
Study participants were selected from the Options Project Cohort. Patients in this cohort enter the study in either primary or early infection -- meaning no patient had been infected with the HIV virus for more than six months.
The six patients who tested negative for the HIV virus were tested using standard second- and third-generation Enzyme Immunoassays, which are the most commonly used tests to screen for HIV infection, and Western Blot tests, which are the most commonly used tests for confirming HIV infection.