Third patient cured of HIV after receiving stem cell cancer treatment
The 53-years-old German man has become the third person ever to be effectively Cured of HIV thanks to a stem cell transplant 10 years ago had undergone a stem cell
transplant in 2013 to cure leukemia he had been diagnosed with two years prior. However, as luck would have it, the cells came from a donor with a mutation that disables the CCR5 receptor that HIV uses to infect immune cells. This effectively made him immune to the disease like an inadvertent AIDS vaccine.
His breakthrough case was first announced in 2019, but it wasn’t until Monday that researchers confirmed he was indeed HIV-free.
“We don’t think there’s a functional virus present,” Dr. Björn Jensen, the study author and division head of infectious diseases at Düsseldorf University Hospital in Germany, told New Scientist
Fast forward to today, and the patient had no detectable traces of the disease left in his system despite stopping his anti-HIV medication in November 2018. Jensen said that this miraculous occurrence demonstrated that the autoimmune disease had been eradicated and was not just in “long-term remission.”
The patient says he’s eternally grateful to the doctors who rid him of the debilitating condition. “I am all the more proud of my worldwide team of doctors who succeeded in curing me of HIV — and at the same time, of course, leukemia,” said the patient. He added that he recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of his life-saving bone marrow transplant with his donor present.
The Düsseldorf patient joins a small group of people who have been cured via cancer-related stem cell transplants. The others were American Timothy Ray Brown who was the first in 2009 and Adam Castillejo, a British-Venezuelan man, over a decade later.
The patient said in a statement that he was "proud of my worldwide team of doctors who succeeded in curing me of HIV -- and at the same time, of course, of leukaemia".
He said he celebrated "in a big way" the 10-year anniversary of his transplant on Valentine's Day last week, adding that the donor was the "guest of honour".
The recoveries of two more people with HIV and cancer, the so-called New York and City of Hope patients, were announced at different scientific conferences last year, though research has yet to be published on those cases.
While a cure for HIV has been long sought after, the bone marrow transplant involved in these cases is a severe and dangerous operation, making it only suitable for a small number of patients suffering from both HIV and blood cancers.
Finding a bone marrow donor with the rare CCR5 mutation can also be a major challenge.
One of the study's co-authors, Asier Saez-Cirion of France's Pasteur Institute, said that during the transplant, "the patient's immune cells are completely replaced by those of the donor, which makes it possible for the vast majority of the infected cells to disappear".
"This is an exceptional situation when all the factors coincide for this transplant to be a successful cure for both leukaemia and HIV," he said.
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