ATMP Patient free of HIV

As direct effect of a continued stem-cell therapy, a British HIV patient with Hodgin lymphoma could not only be successfully medicated against lymph bland cancer, but was also verified to be free of virus for 18 months.

This was reported by Jana Zeh in ntv (https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Arzte-befreien-Aids-Kranken-von-HI-Viren-article20889138.html) and refers to the Accelerated Article Preview of a nature article, "HIV-1 remission following CCR5Δ32/ Δ32 haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation" published on 5th of March 2019.

This case of the “Londoner Patient” resembles the patient history of the “Berliner Patient” in 2008: an HIV patient suffering from blood cancer who depends on a bone-marrow donation. Here again, besides being cured from leukemia, the patient´s blood did not reveal any HI viruses for more than three years. Therefore, this patient was considered being cured from HIV and went down in medical history. For both patients, donators with both, specially well-matched genetic features and a special mutation in their genes preventing an infection with HI viruses, were found. But still, experts don´t want to speak of having HIV cured yet. Even though repeatability is a decisive criterion, many setbacks of therapy trials are documented. Anyway, there is a common agreement that, also in future, stem-cell transplantation is not the method of choice for therapy of HIV infections as this high-risk therapy is not justified in the face of long-term well-tolerated antiviral therapy. Only for cancer patients with HIV infection, stem-cell transplantation could be an option. However, searching the matching donor is a very intense procedure, as only 1 % of the total population is carrier of the HIV-preventive mutation.

The complete ntv article is available here.

The complete nature article is available here.