Gero Hutter: “I believe it’s possible to develop a mass-market single-shot treatment for HIV,”

In this article he offers hope that we are finally close to a cure.
Hutter offers,“If we can overcome a few problems, our approach is closer to a complete cure than anything in the last 30 years.”

See the article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2015/may/12/hiv-immunity-rare-gene-differences-offer-hope-for-treatment
Excerpts:
Hütter appeared to have the perfect solution. But after the accolades and the acclaim died down, reality has slowly set in. Since Brown, six more HIV patients have been treated with similar transplants around the world. None have survived longer than twelve months.
Instead of trapping and slowly eliminating the virus, some believe that disabling the CCR5 receptor simply provoked it to mutate and invade cells via alternative receptors. But why did this happen in those patients while Brown was cured? “If we can understand this, we may be able to translate his cure into something feasible for all patients,” Hütter says.

It was 16 years ago that Professor Michael Farzan discovered the beneficial qualities of the CCR5 gene mutation at Harvard University. Now he believes he’s close to developing an HIV vaccine based on this form of natural immunity.

While the CCR5 mutation has received the lion’s share of the spotlight, it’s also not the only form of natural immunity to HIV. At the University of Minnesota, Professor Reuben Harris is studying couples with mixed HIV status. “These instances are extremely interesting because you have an infected person and their partner who remains HIV-negative despite many opportunities for the virus to be transmitted,” he says. “By taking blood samples, we can play around with the virus and work out what changes would need to be made in order for it to infect cells from the partner. And from that we can work out what’s protecting them.”
There’s a particular family of genes called APOBEC3 which produces antiretroviral enzymes, one of the body’s main defences against viral infection. Harris has found that people with specific variations of the gene APOBEC3H produce stronger and more stable enzymes which can inhibit the replication of HIV. Having the right variant of this gene may make the likelihood of transmission much lower.