A 60-year-old man in Berlin has become only the seventh person in recorded history to be cured of HIV, and the circumstances surrounding his case have left the scientific community genuinely stunned. The man was diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and later developed a serious form of blood cancer that required a full stem cell transplant to treat. His doctors searched extensively for a donor carrying the rare genetic mutation that every previous HIV cure had relied on, but no suitable match could be found anywhere in the donor registry, meaning they had no choice but to move forward with a donor who did not carry it. They accepted the uncertainty and began treatment, not knowing they were about to rewrite the history of what is possible.
Seven years after the man stopped taking his antiretroviral medication, the drugs that suppress HIV replication in the body, researchers have searched his immune system thoroughly and found absolutely no trace of the virus remaining. His antibody response to HIV has been steadily fading, which doctors say is precisely what happens when the body has nothing left to defend against and the immune system has fully moved on from a threat that no longer exists. The case, published in the journal Nature, directly challenges a scientific assumption that had hardened over more than two decades, which held that a very specific genetic shield in donor cells was the essential and irreplaceable ingredient for curing HIV through transplantation. Researchers now believe the procedure may have triggered a powerful immune reaction that hunted down and eliminated the cells where the virus had been quietly hiding, and they say the findings could meaningfully change how doctors think about which patients might one day be candidates for a cure.
Source: https://techfixated.com/man-unexpectedly-cured-of-hiv-after-stem-cell-transplant/
