Word: ho
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thousands, not millions, but billions of copies of itself. And every day the body launched billions of immune cells to counter the threat. The wonder was not that the immune system eventually crashed. Given such intense fighting and heavy casualties, the wonder was that it lasted so long. Ho and Shaw came up with the answer at the same time and published their results in back-to-back articles in a 1995 issue of Nature...
...that the protease inhibitors had become available, doctors were eager to combine them with the old standby AZT and a third drug called 3TC. A couple of mathematical models--created by one of Ho's collaborators, Alan Perelson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory--suggested that HIV would have a hard time simultaneously undergoing the minimum three mutations necessary to resist combination therapy. He placed the odds at 10 million to 1. It was at least worth...
...sounds so hopeful. Why don't scientists say at the very least that they're close to the cure? For the same reason that Ho did not promise the crowd in Vancouver that he could eliminate HIV from people in the later stages of the infection. Researchers know that after years of infection, there isn't a hiding place in the body that the virus hasn't penetrated. A cure must do much more than clear HIV from the bloodstream. It must remove the virus from the lymph nodes, the brain, the spinal fluid, the male's testes and everywhere...
...what if you could avoid all those problems, Ho wondered. What if you didn't wait until the end stages of the disease but started combination therapy during the first few weeks of the infection, before too many billion viral particles had formed, before resistance became inevitable, before too many billion immune cells had died in the body's defense? Would you have tilted the odds enough in the immune system so that it could wipe out whatever stragglers might be left, wherever they were hiding...
...find out, Ho and one of his team, Dr. Martin Markowitz, recruited two dozen men in the earliest stages of infection and placed them on combination therapy. All the men appeared healthy before treatment. For them, ironically, the first signs of illness have been the side effects of the drugs they are taking, not the virus. Three have dropped out because they couldn't take the nausea and cramping...