60-year-old German man likely ‘cured’ HIVDoctors announced this as a medical milestone that only six other people have achieved.
The man was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer. cancer It starts with young white blood cells in the bone marrow through a stem cell transplant.
This painful and risky procedure is reserved for people with both HIV and advanced leukemia and is not an option for nearly all of the roughly 40 million people living with the deadly virus worldwide.
According to his doctors, he is now cured of both cancer and HIV.
The anonymous German man said: Berlin Patient’.
Timothy Ray Brown with his dog Jack at Treasure Island in San Francisco in 2011. A long-time known patient of Berlin, Brown received a transplant in Germany from a donor with natural resistance to the AIDS virus. Brown was thought to be cured of his leukemia and HIV.
HIV diagnoses increased by 22% from 3,118 in 2021 to 3,805 in 2022, according to the latest UKHSA data.
Berlin’s first patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person to be declared cured of HIV, in 2008. Brown died of cancer in 2020.
A second man from Berlin has been announced as having achieved long-term HIV remission, ahead of the 25th International AIDS Conference in Munich, Germany next week.
He was first diagnosed with HIV in 2009, according to a research summary presented at the conference.
The man underwent a bone marrow transplant for leukemia in 2015, a procedure that carries a 10 percent risk of death and essentially replaces a person’s immune system.
He then stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, which reduce the amount of HIV in his blood, in late 2018.
Now, nearly six years later, he appears to be cured of both HIV and cancer, according to medical researchers.
Christian Gaebler, a physician and researcher at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital, who is treating the patient, said the team “cannot be absolutely sure” that all traces of HIV have been eradicated.
But “this patient’s case strongly suggests that HIV can be cured,” Gaebler added.
“He is in good spirits and is eager to contribute to our research efforts.”
According to the National AIDS Trust, there are an estimated 105,200 people living with HIV in the UK.
However, only 94 percent of these people receive a diagnosis.
This means that around 1 in 16 people living with HIV in the UK do not know they have the virus.
Sharon Lewin, president of the International AIDS Society, said she was hesitant to use the word “cure” because it was unclear how long researchers would need to follow such cases.
But being in remission for more than five years means the man is “close” to being considered cured, she told a news conference.
She said there are important differences between this man’s case and other HIV patients who have achieved long-term remission.
All but one of the remaining patients received stem cells from donors who carried a rare mutation in the CCR5 gene that means part of the gene is missing, preventing HIV from entering the body’s cells.
These donors inherited one copy of the mutated CCR5 gene from each parent, making them “essentially immune” to HIV, Lewin said.
But the new patient in Berlin is the first to receive stem cells from a donor who inherited just one copy of the mutated gene.
About 15 percent of people from Europe have one mutated copy and 1 percent have both.
According to the National AIDS Trust, there are an estimated 105,200 people living with HIV in the UK (Stock)
Timothy Ray Brown poses for a photo in Seattle, Monday, March 4, 2019. Brown, also known as the “Berlin Patient,” was the first person to be cured of HIV infection.
The researchers hope that this success will mean that the pool of potential donors will be much larger in future.
Mr Lewin said the new case was “encouraging” for wider research into HIV treatments that would work for all patients.
This suggests that “it is not necessary to remove every part of CCR5 for gene therapy to be successful,” she added.
The Geneva patient, whose case was presented at last year’s AIDS conference, is the other exception among the seven: He received a transplant from a donor without the CCR5 mutation and still achieved long-term remission.
This suggests that the effectiveness of the treatment is not solely due to the CCR5 gene, Lewin said.
The first patient to be “cured,” Brown, was diagnosed with HIV in 1995 while studying abroad in Berlin.
Ten years later, he was diagnosed with leukemia, a cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow.
Acute myeloid leukaemia is the most common type in adults, with around 3,000 cases diagnosed in the UK and 20,000 in the US each year.
It is also the deadliest disease, killing 2,700 people each year in the UK and 11,000 in the US.
To treat his leukemia, doctors at the Free University of Berlin hoped to perform a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that gives him natural resistance to HIV, thus eradicating both diseases.
After two painful and risky operations, the operations were successful and Brown was declared free of both diseases in 2008, initially referred to at medical conferences as “the Berlin patient” to preserve his anonymity.
Two years later, he decided to break his silence and become a public figure, giving speeches and interviews and setting up his own foundation.
“I am living proof that there may be a cure for AIDS,” he told AFP in 2012. “It would be so wonderful to be able to cure HIV.”
Although he was cured of HIV, the cancer returned.
Ten years after Brown was cured, a second HIV patient, known as the “London patient,” was found to be in remission 19 months after undergoing similar treatment.
The patient, Adam Castillejo, is currently HIV-free.
For other patients Düsseldorf patient 2023New York Patient in 2022, Esperanza Patient in 2021, and Loreen Willenberg in 2020.
Unlike other patients, Esperanza and Willenberg’s immune systems naturally clear the virus from their bodies.
