Man with HIV cured of virus after stem cell transplant
Date
2/22/2023 7:05:02 AM
(MENAFN) A 53-year-old HIV patient in Düsseldorf, Germany has become one of only a handful of people to be cured of the virus after receiving a stem cell transplant. The patient, who also had cancer, underwent a bone marrow transplant in 2013 which replaced his cells with a donor's HIV-resistant stem cells. The donor had a mutation which prevents the protein used by HIV to enter cells.
The patient had been receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) to make the virus nearly undetectable and prevent transmission to others. The stem cell transplant can "substantially reduce the viral reservoir," according to a study published this week in Nature Medicine. Although the patient's HIV was considered undetectable, he still had HIV reservoirs and tested positive for traces of virus DNA and RNA. However, additional tests showed that the virus did not replicate.
After 69 months of ART treatment, the medical team decided to test what would happen if the patient stopped therapy. In 2018, he stopped ART and has remained HIV-free since then. "It shows it's not impossible — it's just very difficult — to remove HIV from the body," said virologist Björn-Erik Jensen, who led the medical team during this patient's treatment.
The first patient considered cured of HIV, Timothy Ray Brown, was known as the "Berlin Patient" because he had been living in the German city with both HIV and leukemia when he received the treatment. Brown underwent blood stem cell transplants from a donor who was immune to HIV when he became gravely ill while battling cancer. Doctors declared Brown "cured" in 2008, not long after his transplant. Brown remained HIV-free until his death in 2020 after his cancer returned.
Another patient, Adam Castillejo, who was dubbed the "London Patient," had a bone marrow transplant to treat Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is untreatable. His donation also came from someone who had the mutation, and his HIV was cured in 2019.
Recent studies have shown promising results for two other patients. A patient at City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, has been in remission for HIV since 2019 after receiving a stem cell transplant to treat acute myelogenous leukemia. Weill Cornell Medicine in New York announced last year an HIV patient appeared free of the virus after a cell transplant to treat the same type of cancer.
According to Nature Medicine, this treatment will likely not be used in HIV patients who don't also have leukemia. Scientists are testing what would happen if a patient's own stem cells were modified to have the mutation needed to block HIV, which would mean they would not need a donor.
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