A man with AIDS in London has become the second known patient to appear to have been completely cured of the virus, following a three-year-old bone marrow stem cell transplant from an HIV-resistant donor.
The donor had a rare genetic mutation that makes him resistant to HIV.
The tests performed on the patient, one and a half years after he stopped the antiretroviral drug treatment against HIV, no longer show the slightest trace of infection in his body. The researchers, led by Professor Ravindra Gupta of the University of Cambridge, published their findings in the journal Nature, according to Reuters, the New York Times and Science.
"There is no virus that we can measure. "We can not detect anything," Gupta said. He noted that the patient is considered "functionally cured" and "in remission", although he added that "it is too early to talk about treatment". As he said, "after two years we will talk more about treatment".
The anonymous and unknown man is now called "the patient of London", in analogy to the "patient of Berlin", the American Timothy Brown, the first and only case of a patient that became known in 2007 that, after a similar bone marrow stem cell transplant treatment in Germany, got rid of HIV and remains cured to this day.
The "London patient" was infected with HIV in 2003 and in 2012 was also diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. In 2016, doctors decided to perform a bone marrow transplant on him, which was his last hope of survival. AIDS has killed about 35 million people since its inception in the 1980s, and some 37 million people are now infected with the virus.
Most scientists, however, are skeptical that such treatments, such as those applied to patients in Berlin and London, can cure all AIDS patients, as the procedure is expensive, complicated and risky, and must be found. suitable donors with the rare mutation (CCR5 Delta 32), which gives immunity against the virus.
Source: KYPE