Third person ‘cured’ of HIV after receiving stem cell cancer treatment

A person has no indicators of an lively HIV an infection after receiving stem cells from a donor who’s immune to the virus

By Michael Le Page

A 53-year-old man in Düsseldorf, Germany, has been declared cured of HIV by docs after a blood stem cell transplant to deal with leukaemia – the third case of this type.

The man has no indicators of lively an infection 4 years after he stopped taking antiretroviral medication. “We don’t think there’s a functional virus present,” says Björn Jensen at Düsseldorf University Hospital.

The “Düsseldorf patient” examined optimistic for HIV in 2008. In 2011, he developed leukaemia that was handled with chemotherapy, nevertheless it got here again the next yr. So, in 2013, the blood stem cells within the man’s bone marrow that give rise to immune cells – together with the cancerous ones – had been killed off by chemotherapy after which changed with donor blood stem cells.

Crucially, docs discovered a donor with a mutation that disables the CCR5 receptor that HIV makes use of to contaminate immune cells. This transplant made the person’s immune system HIV-resistant.

In 2017, the crew was in a position to cease giving him immunosuppressing medication to stop rejection of the donor cells and, in November 2018, antiretroviral remedy was halted.

Two different folks handled for most cancers have beforehand been reported to have been cured of HIV in the identical manner. However, as a result of bone marrow transplantation is dangerous, and provided that drug remedy can hold the virus in examine, this may by no means be used to deal with HIV alone.

One various method that’s being explored is to make use of gene modifying to mutate the CCR5 gene within the immune system of people who find themselves HIV-positive.

Sign as much as our free Health Check publication that provides you the well being, weight loss plan and health news you possibly can belief, each Saturday