Science has shown progress in the treatment of HIV, as it was announced on Wednesday that the fifth case of the disease has been cured, which once again indicates that ridding the body of all copies of the viable virus is indeed possible, according to the American “NBC News” network, and The Washington Post.

The announcement came during the work of the International AIDS Conference in Montreal, where another case was presented, which confirmed that immunity can be stimulated to control the virus known as “AIDS”.

In one case, scientists reported that a 66-year-old American man with HIV and cancer was in long-term recovery after receiving a blood stem cell transplant containing a rare mutation, raising the possibility that doctors could one day be able to Using genetic modification to recreate the mutation and treat patients.

The approach, which has proven successful in four other cases, uses stem cells from a donor who has a specific rare genetic abnormality that gives rise to immune cells that are naturally resistant to the virus.

Currently, a critical, fatal mutation of the virus is rare, leaving treatment unavailable for the vast majority of the 38 million HIV-positive patients, including more than 1.2 million in the United States.

Bone marrow transplants also carry significant risks and have only been used in HIV patients who have had cancer.

In the other case, researchers from Spain found that a woman who received an immune-boosting system in 2006 was in a state of “viral remission”, meaning she was still harboring viable HIV, but her immune system had been controlling the replication of the virus for more than two years. 15 years.

There are no guarantees of success with the stem cell transplant method, as researchers have failed to treat HIV using this approach in a large number of other people infected with the virus, according to the network.

Nor is it clear that the immune-boosting approach used in the Spanish patient will work for other HIV-positive people.

The scientists involved in this case told NBC News that more research is needed to understand why the treatment appears to be successful in the woman. “Whether certain aspects of their genes can make the virus inactive, and whether they can identify such a genetic profile in other people.”

The ultimate goal of the field of HIV treatment research is to develop safe, effective, acceptable, and most importantly scalable therapies to be made available to broad segments of the global population living with HIV.