Photo: dpa / Hans Gelderblom
BerlinIt is the second case worldwide: an HIV-infected person known as a London patient is likely to be cured. Around two and a half years after the end of anti-HIV therapy, the patient was no longer able to detect a functional HI virus, explains a group led by medical doctor Ravindra Gupta from the University of Cambridge in the UK in the Lancet HIV magazine.
The patient, who suffered from blood cancer as well as HIV, had previously received a special stem cell donation. The researchers emphasize that stem cell therapy is a high-risk treatment that is out of the question for most HIV patients. That reports the German press agency (dpa).
Still no cure is possible
To date, a cure for AIDS is fundamentally not possible. With the help of antiretroviral drugs, however, the pathogen can be kept in check and the outbreak of AIDS can be prevented in the long term. In London’s patient, as well as in Berlin’s Timothy Brown, who has been cured since 2011, the immune system was rebuilt through stem cell therapy.
People with a rare genetic modification that makes them immune to the HI virus were selected as stem cell donors. The mutation means that the cells no longer form those binding sites through which most HI viruses enter the cells. This binding site is called the CCR5 receptor.
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Viruses are sometimes unable to reproduce
“Our results show that the success of stem cell transplantation as a cure for HIV, which was first reported in the Berlin patient nine years ago, can be repeated,” says Gupta. The Berlin patient also had some form of blood cancer.
Gupta’s team examined numerous fluid and tissue samples from the London patient. The scientists found parts of the genetic makeup of HI viruses in some samples. However, they assume that these are so-called fossil DNA strands that do not belong to a reproductive virus. Many other data, such as the sharp decline in the number of HIV-specific antibodies, indicated that the virus had disappeared from the patient’s body, the researchers write.
An accompanying commentary is about when an HIV patient can be considered cured. Medicine now knows that most viruses that survive anti-HIV therapy are, to a certain extent, defective and cannot multiply, write Australian researchers. They object: “A cure for HIV could be better defined as” no intact virus “than” no detectable virus “.”
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