66-year-old likely cured of HIV after stem cell transplant
After receiving a stem cell transplant, a 66-year-old man could become the fifth person to be cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, researchers reported Wednesday (July 27). The patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, is the oldest person to have undergone the procedure and achieved long-term remission of the disease.
The man, known as the “City of Hope patient” after the Los Angeles medical center where he was treated, was diagnosed first HIVthe human immunodeficiency virus, in 1988 pursuant to a expression (opens in 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,” said the patient.
Just a year earlier, in March 1987, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first antiretroviral therapy, or medication, for HIV, called azidothymidine (AZT). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (opens in new tab). It was not until the mid-1990s that combination therapies for HIV were used; These therapies combined two to three HIV drugs to increase the effectiveness of the treatment and prevent patients from developing resistance to the drugs. Such combination therapies are now the standard of care for the treatment of HIV.
The City of Hope patient took antiretroviral drugs to control his HIV infection for over 31 years. At some point the man’s condition had progressed to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), meaning he was white blood The cell count had fallen to a critically low level, NBC News reports (opens in new tab). He took AZT and some of the other early HIV drugs prescribed individually before switching to a highly effective combination antiretroviral regimen in the 1990s.
Related: A British man becomes the second person cured of HIV after 30 months without the virus
A few decades later, in 2018, the patient developed acute myeloid leukemia (also called acute myeloid leukemia or AML), a Cancer of the blood and bone marrow. To treat cancer and HIV, doctors performed a blood stem cell transplant using cells from a donor who carried a rare genetic mutation. Dubbed homozygous CCR5 delta 32, this mutation makes its carrier resistant to HIV by altering the route the virus normally uses to enter the body’s white blood cells.
After the man’s transplant, these mutant HIV-resistant cells steadily took over his immune system. In March 2021, under the careful supervision of his medical team, the patient stopped taking antiretroviral drugs and to date there have been no signs of HIV replication in his body.
The team describes the patient as being in long-term remission because there has been no trace of viable virus in his system for 17 months; They will continue to monitor his condition and may officially declare him “cured” at a later date if his status remains unchanged, NBC News reported.
The case of the City of Hope patient is very similar to that of the so-called Berlin patient, the first person to be cured of HIV.
The Berlin patient who later revealed his name Timothy Ray Brown, also developed AML and received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with an HIV-resistant genetic mutation. (Bone marrow contains blood stem cells.) Two others — the patients from Dusseldorf and London — have been cured using the same procedure, according to NBC News, and one recently woman was healed after receiving a stem cell transplant using cord blood cells, Live Science previously reported.
“[The City of Hope patient’s case] is another case resembling Timothy Brown years ago,” David D. Ho, one of the world’s leading AIDS researchers and director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, said the Washington Post (opens in new tab). However, given the risks of the transplant procedure and the rarity of the HIV-resistant mutation, such treatments are inaccessible to the majority of HIV patients, Ho said.
“While transplantation is not an option for most people living with HIV, these cases are interesting, inspiring and illuminating the search for a cure,” says Dr. Sharon Lewin, an infectious disease specialist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said at a news conference, according to NBC News. Some research groups are working to develop gene-editing techniques that could introduce the HIV-resistant mutation into patients, the Washington Post reported.
dr Jana K. Dickter, City of Hope Associate Clinical Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases, spoke on the case of the City of Hope patient at the 2022 International AIDS Conference in Montreal on Wednesday.
Originally published on Live Science.
66-year-old likely cured of HIV after stem cell transplant Source link 66-year-old likely cured of HIV after stem cell transplant
