A large coalition of British scientists from five of the country’s leading universities are crossing their fingers that they have accomplished the seemingly impossible — creating the first reproducible cure for HIV. 
 
 As initially reported by The Sunday Times, researchers have begun a clinical trial that will test out an experimental therapy designed to completely eradicate the virus from a person’s body. While the trial will eventually enroll 50 participants in total, the early results so far are very encouraging. The trial’s first patient, a 44-year-old British social care worker, currently has no detectable traces of the virus in his blood following treatment. However, it will take several months to determine whether this vanishing act is indeed anything more than smoke and mirrors. It will then take additional years of follow-up tests to be absolutely sure. 
 
 “This is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV. We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV,” Mark Samuels, managing director of the National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infrastructure, told The Sunday Times. “This is a huge challenge and it’s still early days but the progress has been remarkable.” 
 
 The therapy is the culmination of a treatment strategy long theorized by HIV scientists, alternatively known as “shock and kill” or “kick and kill.” 
 
 In either case, scientists have been exhaustively searching for chemicals called latency-reactivating agents that can awaken the dormant vestiges of a HIV infection driven underground by conventional antiretroviral therapy (ART). While ART has nowadays allowed people living with HIV to live near-normal lifespans by drastically reducing the amount of the virus in their body, the treatment is ultimately a constant burden — the minute someone stops taking ART, the hidden reservoirs of HIV resurrect themselves and begin mass production anew. 
 
 The two-step therapy utilized by the researchers involves a drug called Vorinostat, which has been shown in the lab to compel T-cells secretly infected by HIV into expressing viral proteins through their outer shells. This forced reappearance, it’s hoped, will allow the immune system alongside ART to flush out the virus once and for all. 
 
 “This therapy is specifically designed to clear the body of all HIV viruses, including dormant ones,” Professor Sarah Fidler, a consultant physician at Imperial College London,” told The Sunday Times. “It has worked in the laboratory and there is good evidence it will work in humans too but we must stress we are still a long way from any actual therapy.” 
 
 Indeed, while the man’s blood appears free of HIV, it’s still a possibility the standard ART drugs he was given may be the real source of the defeat. ART regularly reduces patients' HIV viral loads to seemingly undetectable levels during treatment so it will take time to confirm whether the virus is forever gone. Even then, the clinical trial — with its remaining 49 participants — will have to run its full course and be properly vetted by independent researchers before anything can be definitively declared. 
 
 Still, for those waiting with bated breath for a HIV-free future, including the 1.2 million adult Americans currently living with the disease, it’s hard to not feel a glimmer of optimism. It’s a feeling that the patient at the center of it all knows well. 
 
 “I took part in the trial to help others as well as myself,” the patient, who is gay, told The Sunday Times. “It would be a massive achievement if, after all these years, something is found to cure people of this disease. The fact that I was a part of that would be incredible.” ||||| UK scientists and clinicians working on a groundbreaking trial to test a possible cure for HIV infection say they have made remarkable progress after a test patient showed no sign of the virus following treatment. 
 
 The research, being carried out by five of Britain’s top universities with NHS support, is combining standard antiretroviral drugs with a drug that reactivates dormant HIV and a vaccine that induces the immune system to destroy the infected cells. 
 
 Antiretoviral drugs alone are highly effective at stopping the virus from reproducing but do not eradicate the disease, so must be taken for life. 
 
 Fifty patients are taking part in the trial. Early tests on the first person to complete the treatment show no signs of the virus in his blood, the Sunday Times reported. 
 
 There is still a long way to go before the treatment can be deemed a success as the virus has previously re-emerged in people thought to have been “cured” and the use of antiretroviral drugs means the researchers cannot be sure the HIV has gone. Nevertheless, there is optimism over the findings. 
 
 Mark Samuels, the managing director of the National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infra­structure, told the Sunday Times: “This is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV. We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV. This is a huge challenge and it’s still early days but the progress has been remarkable.” 
 
 HIV is able to hide from the immune system in dormant cells where highly sophisticated modern testing cannot find it, and therefore resist therapy. The treatment endeavours to trick the virus into emerging from its hiding places and then trigger the body’s immune system to recognise it and attack it, an approach that has been called “kick and kill”. 
 
 There are approximately 37 million people living with HIV worldwide and about 35 million people have died from the virus. 
 
 The difficulty of declaring a patient clear of HIV was illustrated by the case of a girl in Mississippi who was put on a strong course of antiretroviral drugs within 30 hours of her birth in 2010 after her mother was found to be HIV positive. Treatment continued until the hospital lost contact with the mother 18 months later. When mother and child reappeared five months later the baby had no detectable virus in her blood, raising hopes that early intervention had cured her, but two years later the virus re-emerged. 
 
 The only person believed to have been cured was Timothy Ray Brown, an American treated in Germany. He needed a bone marrow transplant to replace his own cancerous cells with stem cells that would remake his immune system; his doctor found him a donor who was naturally resistant to HIV infection due to a genetic mutation that blocks HIV from entering the cells in the human body. 
 
 However, stem cell transplants are difficult and potentially dangerous for the recipient and only undertaken where they can save a life.
– The first results of a study out of the UK are raising the tantalizing possibility that researchers have figured not just how to treat HIV but how to actually cure it. The first of 50 patients to undergo the experimental therapy, a 44-year-old British social worker, has no detectable traces of the virus in his blood, reports the Sunday Times. The team of scientists from the UK's leading universities say it's way too early to claim success, but they're clearly optimistic. "We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV,” says Mark Samuels of the National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infrastructure. “This is a huge challenge and it’s still early days but the progress has been remarkable.” The treatment is kind of a one-two punch, explains Medical Daily. First, it uses standard antiretroviral drugs, the type used by today's HIV patients to keep the virus from reproducing and thus remain in check. But, crucially, it then does something those ART drugs cannot do—it eliminates dormant cells that lie in hiding. (Those dormant cells are the reason HIV treatment is currently a lifelong prospect.) The Guardian reports that the second phase of the treatment, involving a drug called Vorinostat, aims to "trick the virus into emerging from its hiding places" so it can be wiped out. For the first patient, at least, it seems to have worked, but researchers say they must monitor his health for years before making definitive claims—because previous hopes about "cures" proved to be false ones.