Third person in world cured of HIV after stem cell transplant
Düsseldorf patient virus-free four years, IrsiCaixa co-coordinated study reveals
A person now known as the Düsseldorf patient is the third in the world to be cured of HIV following a stem cell transplant, the IciStem international consortium revealed in an article published in Nature Medicine journal on Monday.
The 55-year-old man, who was diagnosed with HIV in 2008, stopped using antiretrovirals years later under the guidance of his doctors following a stem cell transplant to treat myeloid leukemia.
The transplant he received came from a donor with a CCR5Δ32 mutation, a genetic alteration that makes HIV infections more unlikely, and he remains virus-free four years later.
The IciStem international consortium's study was coordinated by the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute – a non-profit foundation in Barcelona backed by the "La Caixa" banking foundation and the Catalan government's health department – and the University Medical Center in Utrecht.
Patients in Berlin and London have also been cured of the virus following similar treatment, while two others in New York and Duarte, in California, are considered to be in remission.
Barcelona patient
This comes months after a 75-year-old woman known as the Barcelona patient made headlines worldwide for keeping HIV in check for 15 years without the use of antiretrovirals.
Her doctors discovered that she had high levels of two types of lymphocytes that are strongly linked to virus inhibition, natural killer cells and CD8+ T cells after participating in a clinical trial.
Unlike the Düsseldorf patient's sterilizing cure, the case in the Catalan capital is known as a functional cure as the patient has managed to suppress the HIV virus rather than completely eliminate it.
At the time, Josep Mallolas, the head of Hospital Clínic's HIV-AIDS unit, told Catalan News that chemotherapy followed by stem cell transplants were not scalable to the rest of the HIV-positive population as they constitute a "very severe treatment" in which "40 to 50% of patients die."
If replicable, a functional cure such as the Barcelona patient's could be a safer option for those with HIV.