Symbolic picture: tablets of an HIV patient
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Timothy Ray Brown aka “Berliner Patient” was the first person to be cured of HIV. Now there are results from a “London patient”: About 2.5 years after the end of anti-HIV therapy, the man was no longer able to detect a functional HI virus.
The “London patient” is said to be a 40-year-old man who comes from Venezuela and later moved to London. Adam Castillejo was tested HIV positive in 2003. He now wanted to be an “ambassador of hope”, he said in an interview with the NY Times.
A group around the medical doctor Ravindra Gupta from the University of Cambridge reports in the journal The Lancetthat the patient had blood cancer in addition to HIV and 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.
Although antiretroviral drugs work well against HIV, they cannot completely remove the virus from the body. However, the pathogen can be kept in check with the help of medication. In the “London patient” as well as in the “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown, who has been cured since 2011, the immune system was rebuilt through stem cell therapy. The stem cell donor had a rare mutation that made him immune to the HI virus. The result is that the cells do not form a CCR5 receptor, which most HI viruses need to dock to a cell in which they could multiply.
The “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown also had some form of blood cancer. The researcher Ravindra Gupta said:
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.
The team around Gupta 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 “fossil” strands of DNA 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.
more on the subject – China: Researchers have been imprisoned for three years for genetic manipulation of babies
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