Can we cure HIV permanently?

Antiretroviral therapy suppresses HIV to undetectable levels but does not eliminate the latent reservoir that quickly rebounds if treatment stops. A handful of patients have apparently been cured after stem-cell transplants with CCR5-Δ32 donors, but the approach is not generalisable.

Open avenues include 'shock and kill', gene editing of CCR5, and broadly neutralising antibodies, none yet effective at scale.