For the second time in the history of the fight against the AIDS epidemic, a patient has been declared “cured” of the virus after a bone marrow transplant. In remission for 18 months, the patient will benefit from close medical supervision.
This is a very important step forward in the fight against HIV. A patient from London who has had the virus for several years has been in remission for 18 months. He received a bone marrow transplant. The transplanted stem cells eliminated the virus from his body. The case of this person, who is called “the London patient” was presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle in the United States, and published this Tuesday, March 5 in the journal Nature.
This incredible healing process was already proven 12 years ago with American Timothy Ray Brown, now 53 years old. A feat that researchers have long tried, but without success, to reproduce until today.
“Healing is not a dream”
Powerful drugs are currently available to control HIV infection, but transplants are risky, with severe side effects that can last for years. Re-arming the body with immune cells similarly modified to resist HIV could, however, succeed as a practical treatment. Suffering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the London patient received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with the mutation of a CCR5 protein in May 2016.
Cells from non-cancer donors have an additional advantage: a genetic mutation that leads to immunity to HIV. The transplant destroyed the cancer without harmful side effects. The transplanted immune cells, now resistant to HIV, appear to have entirely replaced his vulnerable cells.
“It shows that a cure is not a dream. It is possible,” said Dr Annemarie Wensing, a virologist at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. For the London patient, learning that he could be cured of both cancer and HIV infection was “surreal” and “overwhelming”. “I never thought there would be a cure in my lifetime,” he said in an email to the New York Times.
Another trial patient
After the operation of Timothy Ray Brown in 2007, who suffered from leukemia and who underwent two bone marrow transplants, doctors tried to cure other patients using the same process. But the virus was coming back with a vengeance, about nine months after patients stopped taking antiretroviral drugs. These repeated failures led scientists to wonder if the recovery of Timtorhy Ray Brown was not ultimately a “fluke”.
The case of the London patient now proves that was not the case. The latter stopped taking anti-HIV drugs in September 2017, making him the first patient since Mr Brown to show signs of recovery more than a year after stopping treatment.
According to the New York Times, another HIV-infected person who received a bone marrow transplant stopped taking anti-HIV drugs four months ago. The details of this case, called the “Dusseldorf patient”, are expected to be presented at the Seattle conference later this week.
.
