HIV is extremely challenging to cure, since it writes itself into your blood's stem cell DNA and even if you could somehow wipe out every individual viral unit

HIV is extremely challenging to cure, since it writes itself into your blood's stem cell DNA and even if you could somehow wipe out every individual viral unit in your body at once, your own cells can still express that DNA and recreate the virus from scratch. We've seen blood cancer patients cured of HIV after getting a bone marrow transplant, where the stem cells in their own bone marrow are wiped out before being replaced with stem cells from a healthy donor, but that's a little too extreme a procedure for widespread use. > A man dubbed the 'Geneva patient' appears to be the latest person cured of HIV after a stem cell transplant for cancer treatment. Unlike the other five known cases, however, he received stem cells from a donor who does not have a rare mutation that prevents HIV from entering cells. The man continues to have undetectable HIV 20 months after stopping antiretroviral therapy (ART). https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2023/first-person-may-be-cured-hiv-after-stem-cell-transplant-without-ccr5-mutation https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2023/first-person-may-be-cu... Mostly the focus has been on developing a vaccine for prevention, and treatments that suppress the disease in the already infected. This is the first safety trial I'm aware of where a strategy that could at least theoretically succeed in curing the already infected has been tried.