Patients received bone marrow transplant from donors with rare mutation, resistant to HIV
Doctors from University Hospital of Dusseldorf, in Germany, announced this week the cure of the AIDS virus in a patient. This was the 5th case registered so far worldwide.
This is a 53 year old man. He had HIV type 1 and was being treated for leukemia. He went into remission for the virus after a bone marrow transplant. Here’s the full of the study published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine (8 MB).
According to the report, the cure for HIV occurred when the “Dusseldorf patient”, who had his identity preserved, received stem cells from a donor with genetics resistant to the virus. The same happened in the 4 previous cases.
The man was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011. Six months later, he started standard treatment against the AIDS virus, with the administration of a cocktail of drugs, mostly retrovirals.
In 2013, to contain the advance of the cancer, the patient received a bone marrow transplant. Doctor Guido Kobbe, who led the treatment, explained that “from the beginning, the goal of transplantation was to control both the leukemia and the HIV virus”.
In this sense, the medical team looked for a donor who had a rare genetic mutation, which would make the carrier genetically resistant to most HIV variants, interrupting viral replication.
Five years after the transplant, to make sure the patient had become resistant to the AIDS virus, the doctors suspended the drugs. It was then that they found that the man no longer had any traces of HIV that could trigger an infection and had decreasing levels of disease-specific antibodies.
“Four years after discontinuing analytical treatment, the absence of viral rebound and the absence of immunological correlates of persistent HIV-1 antigen are strong evidence of HIV-1 cure”, wrote the scientists.
Although the approach is considered promising and replicable, it has not been successful in several other patients.
There is also a discussion in the scientific community around the risk of claiming that the patient is really cured of the AIDS virus. This is because HIV can remain “hidden” in immune cells for years, and the methods available to detect them are limited, said infectologists Sharon Lewin and Jennifer Zerbato in an article published in the scientific journal The Lancet in 2020.
OTHER CASES
- 2009 – Timothy Ray Brown, called “berlin patient”, was the 1st person considered cured of HIV. She died in 2020 from cancer, but had not had the AIDS virus since 2012;
- 2019 – Adam Castillejo, the “london patient”;
- 2022 – the 3rd and 4th cases were a woman and a man, who had their identities preserved.
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