Re: do you think anything can cure completely?

Nope - nobody has yet figured out how to remove HIV from a cell after it has been integrated into your DNA. Current therapies can stop the virus from replicating or infecting new cells, but cannot eliminate it from your body completely. The difficulty is that HIV establishes reservoirs of infection in long-lived cells.

In the news recently was a single individual who may have been cured of HIV with a bone marrow transplant where the donor marrow was from a person who had the CCR5-delta-32 mutation (a mutation that confers resistance to CCR5-tropic HIV). Thus far, it's unknown whether the HIV has actually been permanently removed from his body. It's also not something anyone would go through unless they needed a bone marrow transplant anyway (30-50% mortality from the procedure itself). It will also not be possible for most people to find a bone marrow match from a donor who also harbors the CCR5d32 mutation. However, there's hope in the future for gene therapies that could do something similar.

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