It’s hard to overstate just how devastating the AIDS crisis was at its peak in the U.S. – and still is today in many parts of the world. In 1995 almost 51,000 Americans died from the disease, the numbers of new cases were at almost record highs, and there were few effective therapies against the virus.

HIV/AIDS medications

Today that picture is very different. New medications and combination therapies have helped reduce the death rate, in some cases turning HIV into a chronic rather than fatal condition. But even now there is no cure.

That’s why the news that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a clinical trial, that we are funding, aimed at eradicating HIV in the body, was so welcome. This could be an important step towards the Holy Grail of AIDS therapies, curing the disease.

The project is headed by Dr. John Zaia at City of Hope near Los Angeles. The team, with researchers from Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) and Sangamo BioSciences, plans on using an individual’s own stem cells to beat the virus.  They will remove some blood stem cells from HIV-infected individuals, then treat them with zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), a kind of molecular scissors, snipping off a protein the AIDS virus needs to infect those cells.

It’s hoped the re-engineered stem cells, when returned to the body, will help create a new blood and immune system that is resistant to the virus. And if the virus can’t infect any new immune cells it could, theoretically, die off. Check out the video we produced a few years back about the project:

Studies in the lab show this approach holds a lot of promise. In a news release announcing the start of the clinical trial, Dr. Zaia said now it’s time to see if it will work in people:

“While we have a number of drugs that are effective in holding HIV at bay, we have nothing that cures it. In addition, for many patients, these medications come with significant long-term problems so there is a real need for a therapy that can help eradicate the virus from a patient completely. That is where our work is focused.”

Like all Phase 1 trials this one is focused on making sure this approach is safe for people, and identifying what, if any, side-effects there are from the treatment. The first group of patients to be treated consists of people with HIV/AIDS who have not responded well to the existing medications.

This is the second trial that CIRM is funding focused on curing HIV/AIDS. Our first, involving the company Calimmune, began its human clinical trial in July 2013. You can read more about that work here.

We know that the road to a cure will not be simple or straightforward. There have been too many false claims of cures or miracle therapies over the years for any of us to want to fall victim to hope and hype. It may even be that the most realistic goal for these approaches is what is called a “functional cure”, one that doesn’t eliminate the virus completely but does eliminate the need to take antiretroviral pills every day.

But when compared to the dark days of 1995, a functional cure is a world away from certain death.