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The third patient with HIV is cured in Germany

2023-02-22 09:50:02Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

The third patient with HIV is cured in Germany

Researchers have reported a third case of a person who was cured of HIV after undergoing a stem cell transplant aimed at curing his leukemia. The study, published in the scientific journal Nature, describes the case of a 53-year-old male patient who underwent a bone marrow (stem cell) transplant to treat his leukemia.

Like the "London" and "Berlin" patients, the donor had a rare mutation that confers resistance to certain types of HIV, such as HIV-1.

"This underlines that these approaches are promising and also reproducible, as it does not remain an isolated case," Jürgen Rockstroh said in a statement.

Rockstroh is a professor and head of infectious disease at the University Hospital of Bonn in Germany and was not involved in the research. However, the researchers noted, the treatment has not been successful for some other patients who have received it.

Although there is still debate about what it means to be "cured of HIV", the new case adds to two previous cases of HIV being cured using the same type of stem cell transplant as the patient from Berlin and the one from London.

It is difficult to definitively prove that someone has been cured of HIV because the virus can remain hidden inside immune cells for a long time, and the methods available to detect them are limited, wrote HIV expert Sharon Lee and colleague Jennifer Zerbato in The Lancet in 2020.

There is a receptor on the target cells of the HIV virus called CCR5. All three cases involved HIV-1 positive patients who underwent a stem cell transplant from a donor with both copies of a rare but naturally occurring CCR5 mutation.

Individuals with this mutation have lower or no expression of the CCR5 receptor on their cells, providing protection against some types of HIV. The transplant essentially replaces the patient's immune system with one that is resistant to HIV.

The patient, whose identity has not been disclosed, was positive for HIV type 1 (HIV-1) and was monitored by researchers at Düsseldorf University Hospital for more than nine years after his transplant in February 2013. The patient
had a type of leukemia called acute myeloid leukemia. Leukemia is a type of cancer that affects the bone marrow, the spongy tissue inside a person's bones that produces new blood and immune cells. The patient continued to take antiviral drugs for HIV until November 2018, when the researchers decided to stop the treatment because, according to them, it was the only way to know if the patient was cured.

Four years after stopping antiretroviral therapy, the researchers could detect no trace of infectious HIV and measured declining levels of HIV-1-specific antibodies.

The genetic material of the HIV virus was largely undetectable, except for sporadic traces detected in some blood and lymph tissue samples. These results are strong evidence that HIV-1 had been cured, the researchers said.


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