A 60-year-old German man is possibly the seventh person to be effectively cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant, doctors have announced.
The painful and risky procedure is reserved for people with both HIV and aggressive leukemia, so it’s not an option for the nearly 40 million people living with this deadly virus worldwide.
The German, who wished to remain anonymous, was dubbed “Berlin’s next patient”. Berlin’s first patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person declared cured of HIV in 2008. Brown died of cancer in 2020.
The second Berlin man was first diagnosed with HIV in 2009. He received a bone marrow transplant for his leukemia in 2015. The procedure, which carries a 10% risk of death, basically replaces the immune system of to a person, write ScienceAlert.
He then stopped taking antiretroviral drugs – which reduce the amount of HIV in the blood – in late 2018.
Seventh person to be healed
Nearly six years later, he appears to have overcome both HIV and cancer, medical researchers said.
Christian Gaebler, a physician-researcher at Berlin’s Charite University Hospital who treated the patient, told AFP the team could not be “absolutely certain” that the last trace of HIV had been eradicated. But “the patient’s case is very suggestive of curing HIV,” Gaebler added. “He is doing well and is excited to contribute to our research efforts.”
There is an important difference between the man’s case and other HIV patients who have achieved long-term remission, doctors say. All but one of the other patients received stem cells from donors with a rare mutation in which part of the CCR5 gene was missing, preventing HIV from entering their body’s cells.
These donors inherited two copies of the mutated CCR5 gene — one from each parent — making them “essentially immune” to HIV, Lewin said.
But the new patient in Berlin is the first to receive stem cells from a donor who inherited a single copy of the mutated gene.
A mutant gene
About 15% of people of European descent have one mutated copy, compared with 1% for both.
Researchers hope the latest success means there will be a much larger pool of potential donors in the future.
The new case also holds “promise” for the development of an HIV cure that works for all patients. This “suggests that you don’t have to get rid of every piece of CCR5 for gene therapy to work,” the doctors say.
The Geneva patient, whose case was announced at last year’s AIDS conference, is the other exception among the seven. He received a transplant from a donor without any CCR5 mutation – and still achieved long-term remission.
This showed that the efficiency of the procedure is not only due to the CCR5 gene.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
