The success means there will be a much larger potential donor pool, researchers hope (Representative)
Paris:
A 60-year-old German man is probably the seventh person to be effectively cured of HIV after a stem cell transplant, doctors announced on Thursday.
The painful and risky procedure is intended for people who have both HIV and aggressive leukemia, so it is not an option for almost all of the nearly 40 million people around the world living with the deadly virus.
The German man, who wished to remain anonymous, was dubbed the “next Berlin patient”.
The original Berlin patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person to be declared cured of HIV in 2008. Brown died of cancer in 2020.
The second man from Berlin to achieve long-term HIV remission, it was announced ahead of the 25th International AIDS Conference to be held in the German city of Munich next week.
According to the research summary presented at the conference, HIV was first diagnosed in 2009.
The man received a bone marrow transplant in 2015 because of his leukemia. The procedure, which carries a 10 percent risk of death, essentially replaces a person’s immune system.
He then stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, which reduce the amount of HIV in the blood, at the end of 2018.
Nearly six years later, he appears to be both HIV and cancer free, the medical researchers said.
Christian Gaebler, a physician-researcher at Charite University Hospital in Berlin who is treating the patient, told AFP that the team cannot be “absolutely certain” that every trace of HIV has been eradicated.
But “the patient’s case is very reminiscent of HIV treatment,” Gaebler added. “He is feeling good and is eager to contribute to our research efforts.”
“Promising” for broader healing
Sharon Lewin, president of the International AIDS Society, said researchers hesitate to use the word “cure” because it is not clear how long to follow such cases.
But more than five years in remission means the man would be “close” to being considered cured, she told a news conference.
There is an important difference between the man’s case and the other HIV patients who have achieved long-term remission, she said.
All but one of the other patients received stem cells from donors with a rare mutation that was missing part of their CCR5 gene, which prevented HIV from entering their body’s cells.
Those donors had inherited two copies of the mutated CCR5 gene — one from each parent — making them “essentially immune” to HIV, Lewin said.
But the new Berlin patient is the first to receive stem cells from a donor who had inherited only one copy of the mutated gene.
About 15 percent of people of European descent have one mutated copy, compared to one percent for both.
Researchers hope the latest success means there will be a much larger potential donor pool in the future.
The new case is also “promising” for the broader search for an HIV treatment that works for all patients, Lewin said.
This is “because it suggests that you don’t actually have to remove every piece of CCR5 for gene therapy to work,” she added.
The Geneva patient, whose case was announced at last year’s AIDS conference, is the other exception among the seven. He received a transplant from a donor without any CCR5 mutations, but still achieved long-term remission.
This showed that the effectiveness of the procedure was not solely due to the CCR5 gene, Lewin said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)