good news for Professor Gilles Pialoux who remains very “cautious”

“We are always very careful”, tempers Monday February 20 on franceinfo Gilles Pialoux. The head of the infectious and tropical diseases department at the Tenon hospital in Paris was live from Seattle, where the AIDS conference is currently taking place. He reacted to the study published Monday in the journal NatureMedicine which reports a new patient with HIV now considered to be probably cured thanks to a bone marrow transplant. This is the third case worldwide. For Gilles Pialoux this is good news but the professor hopes above all “to copy by gene therapy what we manage to do in some patients”.

franceinfo: Is this one more step and a hope for the entire scientific and medical community?

Gilles Pialoux: For us, it’s more science than medicine in the sense that it’s not transferable. These patients have a hematological disease, they are going to have stem cell or marrow transplants which are extremely heavy because the body has to accept the transplant.

We are always very careful. The expected step is to copy by gene therapy what we manage to do in some patients. The other caution is that we are talking about these three patients but there are also all the failures.

On this subject, one has the impression that caution and hope are proportional to the drama that AIDS has represented for decades?

Indeed, we are very cautious because the Covid-19 crisis has pushed back claims, prevention, screening and even access to treatment and research. This catch-up is therefore necessary. It goes through fundamental ways but it also goes through more tangible ways which are new treatments and new aspects of prevention.

“We are cautious because overall we have good current tools for treatment and prevention, but the account is not there at the global level when we look at the number of new infections.”

Gilles Pialoux, head of the infectious and tropical diseases department at Tenon hospital

at franceinfo

We imagine that these advances are also essential to stimulate further work in the scientific world?

Of course. There are still two projects on the way: the cure we are talking about here in three patients and the vaccine. We are condemned to humility on these two themes. In the history of vaccines, we are always better when we copy something that nature does itself, for example hepatitis B. There we have a very complicated model in some patients, a sort of five-legged sheep. If we manage to do this with gene therapies, for example, that will definitely be a major step forward. Where other research such as vaccine research is marking time.