She's the woman who co-discovered HIV in 1983, and won a Nobel Prize for her work. But French scientist, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi has bad news concerning the cure for the deadly virus.
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi
A French scientist who is the woman that co-discovered HIV in 1983, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, spoke with CNN at this week's International AIDS Society Conference, in Vancouver.
The Nobel Prize winner for her work, spoke about activism, the future of HIV and why there's still no cure, as well as answering questions submitted readers on Twitter.
How do you feel about the stage we're at now in HIV science?
We were very naive after the discovery of the virus. We said, okay, now that we have found the agent responsible for the disease we will be capable to develop very fast a treatment, a cure; we will be able to develop very rapidly a vaccine and more than 30 years later we still do not have a cure, we still do not have a vaccine.
At that time we did not understand the complexity of the interaction between the virus and the body. It's really over the years that we started to understand all the complexities, not only of the virus but of this interaction, of the response of the host (patient) to the infection, the role of genetics, the role of immunology. Science has made wonderful progress but we are far from understanding everything.
And how about the development of the vaccines?
Even though we do not have a vaccine, I think we have learned a lot from the negative results as well. It's not a failure. We are learning from negative data as much as we learn from positive data and I think vaccine research is typical of that. In the last six - seven years we are starting to see a lot of progress in the field of HIV vaccine.
I think the field of vaccinology in general is moving and maybe I am too optimistic, but I like to think because of HIV the field of vaccinology globally is moving, not only for HIV. But difficult to say today, because we do not have a cure. I am not sure, by the way, we will have a cure. I used to say to develop a cure for HIV is an impossible mission.
What about a "functional cure"?
I prefer to say remission (when the virus is brought down to low levels in the body) ... That's possible. I'm convinced one day -- I don't know when -- we will have a strategy to induce durable remission. I don't believe that we will have only one treatment. It will be a combination of treatments. (But) we need both -- a cure and a vaccine.
Are you really not optimistic that a cure will be possible?
A cure for me is almost an impossible mission because the reservoir of cells is not only in the blood. How to eliminate all the cells which are reservoirs is why I say it's an impossible mission. They are everywhere - in the gut, in the brain, in all the lymphoid tissue.
Even if you have a very efficient strategy, how you can make sure that there's not one or two cells still there and if one is there the virus will reappear again? That's why I say it's an impossible mission. But you never know.
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CNN