According to a paper published in Nature Medicine, a third person has been cured of HIV. The paper reports that the 53-year-old man in Düsseldorf, Germany, has no signs of an active HIV infection after receiving stem cells from a donor who is resistant to the virus.
The patient tested positive for HIV in 2008. He developed leukaemia in 2011, which was treated with chemotherapy, but the cancer returned in 2012.
In 2013 the patient received a blood stem cell transplant from a donor who had a mutation that prevents the protein used by HIV to enter cells. This transplant made the patient's immune system HIV-resistant.
Four years after he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, Dr Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen from Düsseldorf University Hospital said: 'We don’t think there's a functional virus present'.
Other people treated for cancer have previously been reported to have been cured of HIV in the same way (see BioNews 1133 and 1039).
For more information read the article in the New Scientist.
