Are we close to a cure for HIV PP paper

Yesterday there was a lot of buzzed in the internet of how five patients had gone through a stem cell transplants and showed no signs of HIV. Does this mean that the virus is not in their body anymore? Can there be a cure after all? According, to the scientific journal “Annals of Internal Medicine”, this is a great start of research that wants to determine associated factors with stem cells transplant that could help the elimination of HVI. This study was based on the peculiar case of Timothy Brown, known as the Berlin patient. He was diagnosed in 1995 with HIV, he had a stem cell transplant to treat his leukemia. His donor had a CCR5- delta 32 mutation, that makes the blood cells to be immune to HVI. And so, Brown became resistant to the virus and is considered to be the only person in the world that has been cured from HIV. In order to discover this type of transplant and other factors, the people that were in charge of conducting the study, asked six volunteers with HIV that also had gone through stem cells transplant to be part of the research. After the analysis, monitoring and antiretroviral treatment, it was observed that five of them had undetectable levels of HIV in the blood and tissues. Also, one of the participants antibodies that was present to protect the virus had disappeared completely after six years after the transplant. This could only mean one thing, HIV was not present in his blood. Despite the promising results, we cannot talk about a cure yet. However, this discovery represents a great advance in new strategies to fight against and eradicate this virus.