HIV: good news revealed to the general public

The cured patients all have a very particular situation in common.

Ct is a new official case of recovery from HIV after a bone marrow transplant: the “Dusseldorf patient” no longer has any trace of the virus in his body, according to work published Monday in Nature Medicine.

Only two similar recovery cases have been described so far in scientific publications: the patient from Berlin in 2009 and the patient from London in 2019.

Two other cases of cures were detailed last year during scientific conferences, but have not yet given rise to publications in due form.

This third patient, a man followed in Düsseldorf, received a stem cell transplant to treat leukemia, then was able to interrupt his antiretroviral treatment against HIV, described the international consortium IciStem, of which the Institut Pasteur is a partner, in the study.

Read also
Male contraception: a promising molecule under study

In their analyses, the researchers did not find viral particles, nor an activatable viral reservoir, nor immune responses against the virus in the organism of this person despite the cessation of treatment for 4 years.

The cured patients all have a very particular situation in common. They were suffering from blood cancers and benefited from a stem cell transplant which deeply renewed their immune system.

Their donor had a rare mutation in a gene called CCR5, a genetic mutation known to prevent HIV from entering cells.

Read also
UV nail lamps can cause cancer

Since less than 1% of the general population carries this HIV protective mutation, it is indeed very rare for a compatible marrow donor to have this mutation.

In 2018, the medical team no longer detected the presence of the virus and planned with the patient a supervised discontinuation of antiretroviral treatment against HIV.

But if these cases of remission bring hope to researchers of one day overcoming HIV, a bone marrow transplant remains a very heavy and risky operation: it is not adaptable to most carriers of the virus.

Read also
“Slow is better”: the slow maturation of the human brain necessary for its proper development