Scientists in the United States say a baby born with HIV may have experienced what is known as a functional cure - that is, she has no need for ongoing drugs and blood tests indicate the virus is not replicating itself.
Within 30 hours of her birth the girl, who still has traces of the virus in her blood, was given three anti-retroviral drugs, instead of the normal one.
Dr Hannah Gay from the University of Mississippi Medical Centre said more research will confirm whether the girl's improved condition is a one off, or the basis of treatment for other babies.
The child, who is now two, has been off medication for a year with no signs of infection.
The BBC reports more testing needs to be done to see if the treatment - which was given within hours of the child's birth - would work for others.
The findings were presented at a conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections in Atlanta by Dr Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
"This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants," she said.
The BBC reports Timothy Ray Brown in 2007 became the first person in the world believed to have recovered from HIV.
His infection was eradicated through an elaborate treatment for leukaemia that involved the destruction of his immune system and a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection.
Swift treatment
In contrast, the case of the Mississippi baby involved a cocktail of widely available drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy, already used to treat HIV infection in infants.
It suggests the swift treatment wiped out HIV before it could form hideouts in the body.
The baby was born in a rural hospital where the mother had only just tested positive for HIV infection. It was then transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
There, Dr Gay, a paediatric HIV specialist, put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs at just 30 hours old, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection.
"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk and deserved our best shot," Dr Gay said.
The treatment was continued for 18 months, at which point the child disappeared from the medical system. Five months later the mother and child turned up again but had stopped the treatment in this interim.
The doctors carried out tests to see if the virus had returned and were astonished to find that it had not.