Jon CohenA 36-year-old man in Brazil has seemingly cleared an HIV infection—making him the proof of principle in humans of a novel drug strategy designed to flush the AIDS virus out of all of its reservoirs in the body.
After receiving an especially aggressive combination of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs and nicotinamide (vitamin B3), the man, who asks to be referred to as the São Paulo Patient to protect his privacy, went off all HIV treatment in March 2019 and has not had the virus return to his blood.The patient’s story is “remarkable,” says Steven Deeks, an HIV/AIDS clinician at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved with this study.