The Case For David Ho

By Alice Park

To get the AIDS epidemic under control, you need brilliant leaders like Dr. Fauci. But if you want to get rid of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS--not just harness it but completely eradicate it from infected individuals--you want Dr. David Ho.

I was part of the team that named Ho TIME's Man of the Year in 1996, and having followed his work in the years since, I suspect that he is a worthy match for the wily virus.

The goal of eradicating HIV with drug therapy is surprisingly controversial. Most physicians have abandoned it; they have found HIV too adept at either hiding from the drugs or mutating to resist them.

Ho, however, is still championing the idea that sufficiently potent antivirals, given in the right combination at the right time, may eliminate HIV and--just possibly--even cure AIDS.

His focus today is the pesky reservoir of virus that camouflages itself from both the body's immune system and any drugs you throw at it. Using clever mathematical models, Ho has reduced HIV's assault on the immune system to a relatively simple math problem. If the virus in the reservoir replicates at a certain rate, and if various drugs slow down this replication at measurable rates, then a drug regimen that outpaces HIV's reproduction could, in theory, permanently shut the virus down.

Working with a four-drug combination that is 20% more potent than today's cocktails, Ho has already shown that it is possible to shrink the reservoir faster than with current regimens. Virus, beware!

--By Alice Park