A study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine reported that a third HIV patient has managed to be cured after a stem cell transplant and that no trace of the AIDS virus remains in his body.
Before the case of this “patient from Düsseldorf” (western Germany), two other HIV patients had managed to be cured, the first of them in Berlin in 2009 and the second in London in 2019.
According to the international consortium IciStem, this third patient had received a stem cell transplant as part of the treatment for leukemia.
After this operation, he was able to interrupt the treatment he was following against HIV.
In the analyzes they did, they found no trace of viral particles, viral reserves or the immune response against the virus.
The three patients who managed to be definitively cured of AIDS have the same point in common: all three suffered from blood cancer and for this reason were treated with a stem cell transplant, which profoundly renewed their immune system.
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In all three cases, their donor had a rare mutation in the CCR5 gene, a genetic change that prevents HIV from entering cells.
“During a bone marrow transplant, the patient’s immune cells are fully replaced by donor cells, which makes it possible to eliminate the vast majority of infected cells,” explains virologist Asier Sáez-Cirion, one of the authors, in a statement. of the study.
“This is an exceptional situation when all these factors coincide for this transplant to be a double success, both for curing leukemia and for HIV,” he adds.
Because less than 1% of the population typically benefits from the protective HIV gene mutation, few stem cell donors have it.
Although these cases give scientists hope to find a cure for AIDS, a stem cell transplant is a risky treatment and one that is not adapted to the situation of the majority of HIV patients.