For only the second time, doctors have announced they have “effectively cured” a patient with HIV using stem cells, sending the virus into “sustained remission.”
The patient in the new case is from the UK but has not been identified.
Reuters reports: ‘An HIV-positive man in Britain has become the second known adult worldwide to be cleared of the AIDS virus after he received a bone marrow transplant from an HIV resistant donor, his doctors said. Almost three years after receiving bone marrow stem cells from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection – and more than 18 months after coming off antiretroviral drugs – highly sensitive tests still show no trace of the man’s previous HIV infection.’
STAT reports: ‘The person who received this latest transplant in London has not taken antiretroviral drugs since September 2017…. “Those of us in the field have been waiting for a second cure via this approach,” said Dr. Keith Jerome, one of the leaders of HIV cure research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “As long as Timothy Brown was the only [one], we’d have always wondered if there [was] something unique about it.”’
Brown, aka the “Berlin Patient,’ was ‘cured’ of HIV infection via chemotherapy, radiation, and genetically-engineered stem cells in 2010.
The doctors’ results were to be published in the journal Nature and at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle on Tuesday.
A 2013 report on Timothy Ray Brown:
