A second person has experienced sustained remission from HIV-1, according to a case study to be published Tuesday in the journal Nature. Effectively, some scientists believe that the “London patient” has been cured of the viral infection, which affects close to 37 million people worldwide.
The new case report comes more than 10 years after the first case, known as the “Berlin patient.” Both patients were treated with stem cell transplants from donors who carried a rare genetic mutation, known as CCR5-delta 32, that made them resistant to HIV.
The London patient has been in remission for 18 months since he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs.
“By achieving remission in a second patient using a similar approach, we have shown that the Berlin Patient was not an anomaly and that it really was the treatment approaches that eliminated HIV in these two people,” said Ravindra Gupta, lead author of the study and a professor in University College London’s Division of Infection and Immunity.
Gupta added that the method used is not appropriate for all patients but offers hope for new treatment strategies, including gene therapies. He and his colleagues will continue to monitor the man’s condition, as it is still too early to say that he has been cured of HIV.
Almost 1 million people die annually from HIV-related causes. Treatment for HIV involves medications that suppress the virus.
“If we can understand better why the procedure works in some patients and not others, we will be closer to our ultimate goal of curing HIV,” said Cooke, who was not involved in the case study. “At the moment the procedure still carries too much risk to be used in patients who are otherwise well, as daily tablet treatment for HIV is able to usually able to maintain patient’s long-term health.”
Dr. Timothy Henrich, an associate professor of medicine and physician scientist at University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, also noted that the London patient’s treatment “is not a scalable, safe or economically viable strategy to induce HIV remission.” For now, its use is restricted to those who need the transplant for other reasons, not for HIV alone, said Henrich, who was not involved in the new case study.
