Eight Infant Macaques Showed No HIV Rebound for a Year. The Third Drug Comes From a Convicted-Fraud Biotech.

A year after they had stopped every drug, Nancy Haigwood and Jonah Sacha went looking for the virus with the harshest tool they had, and came up empty.

At the Oregon National Primate Research Center, Haigwood’s team had infected 8 newborn rhesus macaques with SHIV, the simian cousin of HIV built to model an infected human infant. Within 72 hours they hit each animal with three things at once. A year after treatment ended, the researchers did the thing that usually settles these arguments: they wiped out the animals’ CD8 T cells, the immune sentries that keep a smoldering infection in check. Strip those cells away and any hidden virus comes roaring back. In all 8, nothing came back. “We were astounded and overjoyed, actually,” Haigwood told OHSU. “It’s a remarkable result.”

It is. Let me say that plainly before I complicate it, because the result deserves it. Reported this month in Nature Microbiology, this is a clean, NIH-funded piece of work showing something the field has chased for forty years: apparent eradication, not lifelong suppression, holding up against the harshest rebound test animal models allow.

The regimen is a tripod, and the point of the paper is that no single leg holds. The animals got a course of daily antiretroviral drugs, a single dose of two broadly neutralizing antibodies to sweep up free virus, and a short course of leronlimab, an experimental antibody that plugs CCR5, the doorway most freshly transmitted HIV uses to get into cells. Antibodies alone, given at the same 72-hour mark, blunted the early spike and then let the virus back. Antibodies plus the antiretrovirals still rebounded. Only the full three-drug combination held. “For reasons we don’t understand,” Sacha said, “HIV really wants to use CCR5 receptors to infect cells.”

So far this is a good day for federally funded science. Then you read the disclosure line, and a second story surfaces.

The experimental leg of the tripod, the one that turned a promising-but-leaky regimen into a clean sweep, is leronlimab, and leronlimab belongs to CytoDyn. Two of the scientists behind the regimen, Jonah Sacha and Scott Hansen, hold a significant financial interest in CytoDyn, the maker of leronlimab. The paper says so in its own hand: they “have had a significant financial interest in CytoDyn, a company that may have a commercial interest in the results of this research and technology.”

That would be a footnote if CytoDyn were an ordinary biotech. It is not. In December 2022 the SEC charged the company’s former chief executive, Nader Pourhassan, with fraud and insider trading over exactly this: overselling leronlimab. In April 2020 CytoDyn announced it had submitted a completed FDA licensing application for the drug, the stock jumped, the FDA told the company within days the submission was inadequate, and shareholders were not told. Pourhassan sold roughly $15.8 million in stock and cleared more than $4.7 million. A jury later convicted him on nine counts, and in January 2026 a judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison. The drug itself spent two years under an FDA clinical hold that was lifted on the HIV program only in 2024.

None of that is the fault of eight macaques, and none of it makes the Nature Microbiology data wrong. The primate work looks careful, and the OHSU scientists are not the men the SEC charged. But it is the backdrop for the sentence the coverage led with, Sacha’s own: that the regimen “could go to clinical trials immediately to eliminate HIV infection in newborns.” The drug at the center of that “immediately” carries a fraud conviction and a two-year regulatory hold in its file. The regulators will remember. The headlines already forgot.

The science has its own cautions, once you get past the summary. The treatment window was 72 hours, and the team was candid that the early start may be the whole ballgame. Real infant infections are rarely caught that fast: the standard diagnostic schedule tests a newborn at birth, then at two to three weeks, then at one to two months, not inside a 72-hour window. The model was SHIV, not HIV. The whole approach leans on the virus using CCR5, and CCR5 is not the only door; strains that enter through CXCR4 would slip past it. Latent virus could still be hiding in bone marrow or the nervous system, where their tests do not reach. Eight animals cleared. The disease those animals model still kills roughly 250 children a day, and it does not arrive on a 72-hour schedule.

The gap between the finding and the framing is an old one. A striking result the field genuinely wanted, a sample you could hold in two hands, and a press cycle that rounds “eight macaques treated within three days” up to “clears HIV in newborns.” The data earned its day. The company attached to it earned its scrutiny. Both are true. Only one made the headline.

Haigwood’s team was astounded by the biology, and the record backs them up. The two names on the financial-interest line were not waiting to learn whether leronlimab works. They were waiting to learn what it is worth.

Sources

1. Nature Microbiology – the primate triple-therapy HIV eradication study (2026)
2. OHSU News – Study: Triple-dose regimen may permanently clear HIV in infected newborns
3. SEC – Charges Former CEO of CytoDyn Nader Pourhassan with Fraud, Insider Trading (2022)
4. Fierce Biotech – Jury convicts ex-CytoDyn CEO on 9 counts tied to biotech fraud
5. Fierce Biotech – CytoDyn finally clears FDA hold on HIV program after two years
6. Inside Precision Medicine – Early research suggests triple therapy could clear HIV in newborns
7. EurekAlert – OHSU release with the CytoDyn conflict-of-interest statement
8. UNAIDS – Global HIV & AIDS statistics fact sheet (pediatric deaths)
9. NIH Clinicalinfo – Diagnosis of HIV Infection in Infants and Children (testing schedule)