SAN FRANCISCO — Scientists are making progress toward a goal that has eluded HIV researchers for more than four decades. In small trials, they have trained the body's immune system to keep the virus in check without daily medication.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and elsewhere have shown in early studies that combinations of immune-based therapies can prime the body to control HIV after patients stop taking antiretroviral drugs. The findings, highlighted in a Bloomberg feature published this week, point toward a possible functional cure, in which the virus stays suppressed without lifelong treatment.

The advances come at a difficult time for the field. Cuts to U.S. government funding threaten the research needed to build on the early results.

From crisis to control

Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at UCSF and one of the world's leading HIV cure researchers, has worked on the disease since the early 1990s.

When he began working at Ward 86, the AIDS clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, in 1993, the epidemic was near its deadliest point in the city. Only a few HIV drugs were available, and none could reliably suppress the virus or stop the disease from progressing.

The arrival of combination antiretroviral therapy in the mid-1990s transformed HIV from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. Today, people with HIV who take daily medication can live near-normal lifespans, and those with suppressed virus cannot transmit it to sexual........

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