After receiving a stem cell transplant, a 66-year-old man could be the fifth person to be cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, researchers reported Wednesday. Patients who wish to remain anonymous are the oldest people who have not yet undergone surgery and have undergone long-term remission from their illness.
A man known as the “City of Hope patient” in connection with the Los Angeles medical center where he was treated was first diagnosed as follows: HIVAccording to the 1988 Human Immunodeficiency Virus statement (Opens in a new tab) Shared by City of Hope. “When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, like many others, I thought it was a death sentence,” the patient said.
Exactly a year ago, in March 1987, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first antiretroviral or HIV treatment called zidovudine (AZT). National Institute of Infectious Diseases (Opens in a new tab).. HIV combination therapy was not used until the mid-1990s. These treatments combine a few HIV drugs to increase the effectiveness of the treatment and prevent the patient from developing resistance to the drug. Such combination therapies are now the standard of care for HIV treatment.
Patients in the City of Hope have been taking antiretroviral drugs for over 31 years to control HIV. At some point, the man’s condition had progressed to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).That is, his white man blood The cell number had dropped to very low levels, NBC News reported (Opens in a new tab).. He took AZT and some of the other early HIV medications individually prescribed before switching to highly effective combination antiretroviral treatments in the 1990s.
Decades later, in 2018, the patient developed acute myeloid leukemia (also known as acute myeloid leukemia, or AML). cancer Of blood and bone marrow. As a treatment for both cancer and HIV, doctors performed blood stem cell transplants using cells from donors with rare genetic mutations. This mutation, called the homozygous CCR5 Delta 32, makes the carrier resistant to HIV by altering the entrance that the virus normally uses to invade the body’s white blood cells.
After the male transplant, these mutated HIV-resistant cells steadily took over him Immune system.. In March 2021, under the careful supervision of his medical team, the patient stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, and to date there were no signs of HIV replication in his body.
The team explains that the patient is in long-term remission because there was no evidence of a viable virus in his system for 17 months. They continue to monitor his condition, and if his condition does not change, he may later formally declare him “healed,” NBC News reported.
The case of the City of Hope patient is very similar to the case of the so-called Berlin patient who was first cured of HIV.
A Berlin patient who later revealed his name Timothy Ray BrownAlso developed AML and received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with an HIV resistant gene mutation. (Bone marrow contains blood stem cells.) According to NBC News, two patients in Düsseldorf and London were cured by the same procedure, and recently one was cured. The woman has healed Live Science previously reported after undergoing a stem cell transplant using cells from cord blood.
“”[The City of Hope patient’s case] Another case, similar to Timothy Brown many years ago, “said David D. Ho, one of the world’s leading AIDS researchers and director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University. teeth, Told the Washington Post (Opens in a new tab).. However, given the risks of the transplant procedure and the rarity of HIV-resistant mutations, such treatments are not available to the majority of HIV patients, Ho said.
“Although transplantation is not an option for most HIV-infected people, these cases are still interesting and inspire and shed light on the search for treatment,” said an infectious disease specialist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. Dr. Sharon Lewin said. According to NBC News, he spoke at a press conference at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Several research groups are working on the development of gene editing techniques that may introduce HIV-resistant mutations into patients, the Washington Post reported.
Dr. Jana K. Dickter, Associate Professor of City of Hope in the Department of Infectious Diseases, spoke about the case of City of Hope patients at the 2022 International AIDS Conference in Montreal on Wednesday.
Originally published in Live Science.
