HIV cure on the horizon

Researchers are hopeful of a cure for HIV after treating the first patient with a promising new treatment that could kill all traces of the virus. A partnership sparked by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is behind this collaborative UK effort for the new treatment, which is a first-of-its-kind. Sarah Fidler, Professor of HIV and Communicable Diseases at Imperial College London and co-Principal Investigator on the study, said: “This first participant has now completed the intervention and we have found it to be safe and well tolerated. Only when all 50 study participants have completed the whole study, by 2018, will we be able to tell if there has been an effect on curing HIV.” Prof Jonathan Weber, Chair of CHERUB Scientific Steering Committee and Director of Research for the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London, said: “CHERUB has made great progress since it was born six years ago. We are now actively recruiting patients to test the ‘Kick and Kill’ theory. “NOCRI was instrumental to this research starting. We are all thoroughly committed to finding a cure for HIV, but if the collaboration between this set of HIV researchers had not been prompted at that meeting six years ago, this simply would not have happened.”