A 60-year-old German man is possibly the seventh person to be effectively cured of HIV following a stem cell transplant, doctors announced Thursday.
This painful and risky procedure is intended for people who suffer from both HIV and aggressive leukemia, so it’s not an option for nearly all of the approximately 40 million people worldwide who suffer from this deadly virus.
The German man, who wished to remain anonymous, has been dubbed the “next Berlin patient”.
Berlin’s original patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person to be cured of HIV in 2008. Brown died of cancer in 2020.
The announcement of Berlin’s second man to have achieved long-term HIV remission comes ahead of the 25th International AIDS Conference to be held in the German city of Munich next week.
According to a research abstract presented at the conference, he was first diagnosed with HIV in 2009.
The man underwent a bone marrow transplant for leukemia in 2015. The procedure, which carries a 10 percent risk of death, essentially replaces a person’s immune system.
He then stopped taking anti-retroviral drugs — which reduce the amount of HIV in the blood — at the end of 2018.
Nearly six years later, he is free of both HIV and cancer, medical researchers report.
Christian Gabler, a doctor-researcher at Berlin’s Charite University Hospital who is treating the patient, told AFP the team is not “fully convinced” that even the last traces of HIV have been eradicated.
But Gabler said the patient’s case “promises a lot toward a cure for HIV.” “He is feeling well and is excited to contribute to our research efforts.”
“Promising” comprehensive treatment
Sharon Levin, president of the International AIDS Society, said researchers hesitate to use the word “cure” because it’s unclear how long they will have to monitor such cases.
But he told a news conference that being disease-free for more than five years means the person is “very close” to being cured.
There’s an important difference between this man’s case and that of other HIV patients who have achieved long-term remission, he said.
All but one of the patients were given stem cells from donors who had a rare mutation in which a portion of their CCR5 gene was missing, preventing 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, Levine said.
But the new patient in Berlin is the first to receive stem cells from a donor who inherited only one copy of the mutated gene.
About 15 percent of people of European descent have one mutated copy, while in both, the percentage is one each.
Researchers hope the latest success means there will be a much greater number of potential donors in the future.
The new case also is “promising” for the broader search for an HIV treatment that works for all patients, Levin said.
“That’s because this shows that you don’t actually need to get rid of every single piece of CCR5 for gene therapy to work,” he said.
The Geneva patient, whose case was announced at last year’s AIDS conference, is the second exception out of seven. He received a transplant from a donor without a CCR5 mutation – yet achieved long-term remission.
Levin said this showed that the effectiveness of the procedure did not depend solely on the CCR5 gene.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
