Another Person Cured of HIV After Stem Cell Transplant
upstart writes:
Another Person Cured of HIV After Stem Cell Transplant:
The Dusseldorf patient is the fifth suspected HIV cure, following a stem cell transplant from a donor genetically resistant to the virus.
[...] According to the man's doctors, he has lived essentially free of the virus for about a decade. Though the treatment isn't practical for the general population living with HIV, the knowledge gained from these patients may help scientists figure out a more scalable cure down the road.
The 53-year-old German resident, known only as the Dusseldorf patient (after the city in Germany) underwent the procedure more than nine years ago. He needed the stem cell transplant to help treat a case of acute myeloid leukemia, a form of cancer that affects white blood cells. But his doctors had the opportunity to rebuild his immune system with compatible donor bone marrow from someone with a rare genetic mutation that provides natural resistance to HIV-1, the most common type of the virus.
Though the man did experience some health problems over the years (including a brief recurrence of his cancer a few months after the transplant), his HIV viral loads stayed consistently undetectable while he remained on antiretroviral therapy. At the same time, some tests suggested that his body still contained traces of HIV RNA and DNA, while others indicated that no surviving fragment would be able to replicate and restart the infection. Eventually, in 2018, his doctors made the choice to wean him completely off HIV treatment and monitor him closely. Thankfully, more than four years later, the infection has not returned and they feel confident enough to declare him cured of HIV.
Journal Reference:
Jensen, Bjorn-Erik Ole, Knops, Elena, Cords, Leon, et al. In-depth virological and immunological characterization of HIV-1 cure after CCR532/32 allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation [open], Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/s41591-023-02213-x)
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