The seventh person cured of HIV received a stem cell transplant from a donor who is not immune to the virus.

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He Seventh HIV cure Thanks to a bone marrow transplant, he was introduced to the scientific community last Wednesday at the International AIDS Conference in Munich. It is the second success story for Berlin’s Charité hospital, as its medical team documented the world’s first case of what is known as “The Berlin Patient” and published in 2009.

But his second patient has a difference: he was able to detect no traces of the HIV virus with the vaccine.maternal cells from a donor who had only a mutated copy of the CCR5 receptor; The mutation of this receptor is the most plausible explanation for why these drugs are possible. Donors who have two mutated copies of CCR5 are immune to HIV, but the donor of the second patient in Berlin had only one copy. However, after receiving the transplant, they saw that HIV was eliminated, and since 2018 he has not taken antiretroviral treatment.

Christian Gebler: “It is very surprising that the patient was cured, although the stem cell donor was not immune to HIV”

“It is very surprising that the patient was cured, although the stem cell donor was not immune to HIV”says the professor Christian GeblerHIV expert and head of the research group at the Charité Department of Infectious Diseases and Intensive Care Medicine and the Charité Institute for Public Health in Berlin (BIH). Analyse the case from an infectious diseases perspective. «In previous cases of stem cell transplants to non-immune donors, the virus re-emerged after several months.«.

It is true that there is another case of an HIV patient who was “cured” after receiving a bone marrow transplant for cancer from a donor who did not carry the rare mutation in his cells. That case, that of a patient known as Geneva, is the sixth documented in the scientific literature, but when it was reported a year ago, there was no trace of the virus for 20 months, far less than the current case, which has been HIV-free for more than five years.

There is another known case of an HIV patient being “cured” after a bone marrow transplant from a non-immune donor, but he was three years younger than the Berlin patient.

For the patient’s medical team, this case demonstrates that HIV can be cured even though there is a functional receptor that the virus can use.. “This means that the fact that the virus was cured appears to be not due to the donor’s CCR5 genetic receptor, but to the fact that the transplanted immune cells destroyed all of the patient’s HIV-infected cells.” explains Gebler. “By replacing his immune system, we apparently destroyed all the places where the virus was hiding, so that it could no longer infect new donor immune cells.”.

However, only 1% of the European population inherited from their parents two copies of the CCR5 receptor with the delta 32 mutation, which makes them immune to HIV. up to 16% have a single copywhich expands the search for suitable donors for people with HIV and certain types of blood cancer that may benefit from a stem cell transplant.

Only 1% of the European population has two copies of the CCR5 receptor with the delta 32 mutation that makes them immune to HIV, but this figure rises to 16% when they carry one copy of the mutated receptor.

The patient who He is now 60 years old.tested positive for HIV in 2009 and was further diagnosed acute myelogenous leukemia in 2015 and began treatment in the Department of Hematology, Oncology and Cancer Immunology at Charité Hospital. His risk profile required him to undergo both chemotherapy and an additional stem cell transplant.

The patient has been closely monitored since the transplant and has not been able to find any signs of the virus remaining. Doctors note that The patient himself was one of the 16% of the European population whose cells contained both a healthy and a mutated version of the CCR5 receptor.. It is unclear whether or how this may have contributed to his recovery. The reality is that he has had no trace of HIV for over five years.

It is unclear why the stem cell transplant resulted in a cure in this case, since in other comparable cases from other patients the virus replicated again.

It is also unclear why the stem cell transplant resulted in a cure in this case, since in other comparable cases from other patients the virus replicated again. Researchers are looking at several potential factors. “The speed at which the new immune system replaces the old one may play a role.”— says Gebler. “In the second patient from Berlin, this was done relatively quickly, in less than 30 days. But The donor’s immune system may also have special characteristics.“They are like highly active natural killer cells, ensuring that even the slightest bit of HIV activity is detected and eliminated.”Add.

The doctors I hope to find answers in investigating the mechanism by which the second patient in Berlin was cured and in improving knowledge about future HIV treatments. The goal is to cure more people, but not through stem cell transplants.a method that, due to its high risk, can only be used on those who need it because of cancer.

Researchers hope to find answers that will help them develop new HIV treatments, such as therapeutic vaccines or immunotherapy.

«Once we better understand what factors contributed to the elimination of the virus from all its hiding places in this patient, we hope to be able to use this knowledge to develop new approaches to treatment, such as immune cell-based therapies or therapeutic vaccines“, the researcher concludes.