HIV is reported cured in a second patient, a milestone in the global AIDS epidemic

With the so-called London patient, they seem to have succeeded.By Apoorva MandavilliFor just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. Once it became clear that Mr. Brown was cured, scientists set out to duplicate his result with other cancer patients infected with H.I.V.In case after case, the virus came roaring back, often around nine months after the patients stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, or else the patients died of cancer. He, too, received immunosuppressive drugs, but the treatment was much less intense, in line with current standards for transplant patients.He quit taking anti-H.I.V. drugs in September 2017, making him the first patient since Mr. Brown known to remain virus-free for more than a year after stopping.“I think this does change the game a little bit,” said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at University College London who presented the findings at the Seattle meeting. “These dreams are motivated by cases like this — it helps us to imagine what might be done in the future.”One important caveat to any such approach is that the patient would still be vulnerable to a form of H.I.V. called X4, which employs a different protein, CXCR4, to enter cells.“This is only going to work if someone has a virus that really only uses CCR5 for entry — and that’s actually probably about 50 percent of the people who are living with H.I.V., if not less,” said Dr. Timothy J.