A man in Brazil has apparently been “cleared” of HIV thanks to “a novel drug strategy designed to flush the AIDS virus out of all of its reservoirs in the body,” according to an article published today (Tuesday, July 7) in Science magazine.
The 36-year-old man who has asked to be referred to only as The Sao Paulo Patient, received “an especially aggressive combination of antiretroviral drugs and nicotinamide — Vitamin B3 — and then went off all HIV treatment in March 2019.
In the year and three months since, according to the magazine’s report, written by Jon Cohen, the virus has not returned to his blood.
These results, the magazine notes, makes the Sao Paulo Patient the “proof of principle in humans” for the ARV/B3 combination treatment.