HIV infection

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At a satellite meeting prior to the International AIDS Meeting in Washington DC in July, a great deal of discussion was focused on finding a “cure” for HIV infection [1]. While this objective has been discussed at various times over the past decade, the real incentive for this goal comes from the encouraging findings with Timothy Brown, also known as the “Berlin patient.” This HIV-infected man received hematopoietic stem cells from an HLA-matched donor whose genome naturally lacked CCR5, the major receptor for HIV. Five years after two transplants, Mr. Brown appears to be cured of HIV as well as leukemia [2]. Although potentially infected with both a virus that requires CCR5 for entry and a small population of viruses that can infect cells by another receptor, no infectious virus can be recovered from his blood and other tissues. This finding includes biopsies from the brain, bowel, and lymph nodes. Certainly his “cure” encourages approaches that could mimic this achievement in all HIV-infected individuals.