Breakthrough: Stem Cell Transplant Leads to 7th HIV Remission Case

German scientists have announced a major medical milestone after confirming the world’s seventh documented case of long-term HIV remission. The breakthrough involves a 60 year old man treated at Charité Hospital in Berlin, who has remained free of detectable HIV for more than seven years without the use of antiretroviral medication.

 

The patient was first diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and later developed acute myeloid leukemia, a life-threatening blood cancer that prompted doctors to perform a stem cell transplant in 2015. Three years after the procedure, he discontinued HIV medication under close clinical supervision. Since then, extensive monitoring has revealed no trace of viral rebound in his blood or tissue samples.

 

This latest success reinforces Berlin’s role at the center of HIV cure research, following the historic case of Timothy Ray Brown, the original “Berlin Patient,” who became the first person in the world to be cured of HIV in 2008. Unlike earlier cases that relied on donors with a rare double mutation in the CCR5 gene, this patient received stem cells from a donor carrying only a single mutated CCR5 copy. The unexpected success expands possible donor pools and challenges previous assumptions about how HIV resistance can be achieved through transplantation.

 

Doctors used aggressive chemotherapy to destroy infected immune cells before replacing the patient’s bone marrow with donor stem cells. His immune system rebuilt itself within a month, and subsequent analyses detected no HIV DNA in blood or gut tissue, suggesting that the virus’s hidden reservoirs long considered the primary barrier to a cure had been effectively eliminated. Genetic variations common in Northern European populations also contributed to making this innovative approach more feasible than once believed.

 

The Berlin case joins six others reported globally, all involving patients with hematologic cancers who required bone marrow transplants for life-saving treatment. Despite the remarkable outcomes, scientists emphasize that stem cell transplantation remains too risky and complex to be offered broadly to the millions living with HIV. Instead, each successful remission offers critical clues that may one day lead to scalable therapies, including gene editing, immune engineering and targeted approaches to dismantle latent viral reservoirs without full transplantation.

 

Even so, the achievement marks another significant step toward understanding how HIV can be functionally cleared from the human body. Ongoing genomic and immunological studies continue to monitor the patient, who remains off all antiviral drugs with no evidence of viral activity an outcome that brings renewed scientific optimism to the long-standing pursuit of an HIV cure.

 

Source: mixvale.com

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