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Table 1 Summary of the main characteristics of the therapeutic strategies described in this review

From: A cure for AIDS: a matter of timing?

 

Notable Results

Stage

Safety

Scalability

ART during acute infection

Long-term post-therapy viral load control in a minority of individuals [16, 17, 2330].

Clinical/pre-clinical

High

Low (few patients are detected HIV+ at acute infection)

Viral reactivation with HDACI’s

Possible disruption of latency [48, 49, 5355]. No viral reservoir reduction [49].

Clinical/pre-clinical

Medium

High

Viral reactivation with cytokines

IL-7 might disrupt latency but replenishes the viral reservoir [5759].

Clinical

Medium

Medium/high

Gene therapy for disruption of CCR5

Mixed impact on viral load (depending on the genetic background) [66]. Possible immunologic improvement [67].

Clinical

Medium (long-term effects unknown)

Very low

Allogeneic stem cell transplant

Likely sterilizing cures in the second “Berlin Patient” [60, 61, 63] and in the “Boston Patients” [68, 69].

Clinical

Very low

Very low

Addition of auranofin and BSO to ART

Long-term post-therapy control in chronically SIVmac251 infected macaques [74, 81].

Late pre-clinical

Medium/high (good safety profile for individual drugs in humans)

High

Therapeutic vaccine with whole virus-pulsed dendritic cells

Post-therapy viral load control in a subset of macaques [88]. Viral load and viral load set-point reduction in a subset of ART-naïve [89, 90] and ART-treated patients [91], respectively

Clinical

High

Medium

Administration of broadly neutralizing antibody/ies

Long-term post-therapy control in chronically SHIV(env) infected macaques starting from low viral loads [95]

Late pre-clinical

High

High

  1. In square brackets are the references describing the main results for each strategy.