For years, Philip Goulder was obsessed with a particularly captivating idea: in hunting for healing of HIV, could children keep the answers?

From the mid-2010 mid-2010s, the pediatrician and immunologist at the University of Oxford began to work with scientists from the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, in order to follow several hundred children who had acquired the HIV of their mother, that is, during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.

After putting children on antiretroviral drugs at the start of their lives to control the virus, Touder and his colleagues wanted to monitor their progress and their membership in standard antiretroviral treatment, which prevents HIV from being replicated. But during the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to recover their medicines, and when the Possilty team found them several months later, they seemed to be in perfect health.

“Instead that their viral charges were through the roof, they were undetectable,” explains Goulder. “And normally, HIV bounces with two or three weeks.”

In a Study published last yearGoulder described how the five remained in remission, despite not having received regular antiretroviral drugs for a while, and in one case, up to 17 months. During the search for serors of decades of a remedy against HIV, it offered an enticing overview: that the first widely spread to heal HIV may not be like in adults, but in children.

At the recent AIDS Society international conference held in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid-July, Alfredo Tagarro, in a pediatrician at the University Hospital of Infanta Sofia in Madrid, presented a new study showing that around 5% of children infected with HIV who receive antiretrovirals in the first number of the six months of life The life of life. negligible levels. “Children have special immunological characteristics, which makes us more likely that we will develop a remedy for HIV for them before other populations,” said Tagarro.

His thoughts were reproduced by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who heads the clinical research unit of children’s infectious diseases at the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town.

“Children have a much more dynamic immune system,” said Cotton. “They involve additional problems such as high blood pressure or kidney problems

According to Tagarro, children with HIV have long been “left behind” in the race to find a treatment that can permanently put HIV -positive individuals in remission. Since 2007, 10 adults have healed beauty, having received stem cell transplants to treat deadly blood cancer, a procedure that ended up removing the virus. However, with such procedures being both complex and very risky – they have a patient in the consequences of similar finding – it is not considered a viable strategy to specifically target HIV.

Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have noticed in an increasing way that after starting an antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small sub-population of children then seems to be deleting to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone. This initiyyal takeover started with certain isolated case studies: the “Mississippi Baby” Who controlled The virus for more than two years without medication, and a South African child who was considered Potentially healed Having kept the virus in remission for more than a decade. Cotton says that it suspects that Between 10 and 20% of all children infected with HIV would be able to control the virus for a significant period of time, beyond two to three typical weeks, after antiretroviral antiretrovirals.