According to a report published on Monday, a man called “the Duesseldorf patient” is the third individual to be pronounced cleared of HIV after getting a stem cell transfusion that also healed his leukemia.
Before now, the high-risk treatment has been described as successful in curing two other instances of HIV and cancer, both patients in Berlin and London.
The case report of the cured patient from Duesseldorf was published in Nature Medicine recently.
The 53-year-old “Düsseldorf Patient,” whose leukemia led to a stem cell transfusion that same year, was treated for his disease. He got stem cells because one of the donors had a mutation that disabled HIV from entering the cells.
Antiretroviral treatment (ART), administered to HIV patients, had virtually eradicated the virus. A further benefit is that it helps keep the patient from spreading the infection.
Even though HIV is still inside the body during ART, a stem cell transfusion can significantly decrease the viral reservoir, where the virus remains, according to research released this week in Nature Medicine.
The Düsseldorf patient receiving ART was continuously monitored. Although he tested negative for HIV, he did have virus carriers in his body. Additional testing, however, revealed that the pathogen did not reproduce.
His medical team did a controlled experiment to see what would happen if he halted the treatment. He discontinued antiretroviral therapy (ART) in 2018 after using it for 69 months and has not shown HIV markers since.
For this patient’s therapy, virologist Björn-Erik Jensen said that it demonstrates that it’s not impossible but rather challenging to eradicate HIV.
Timothy Ray Brown, the first person thought to be cleared of HIV, was called the “Berlin Patient”, as he was residing in Berlin, Germany. He was seeking treatment for HIV and leukemia when he received the therapy.
When he became critically ill from his battle with cancer, Brown received blood stem cell transfusions from a source who was resistant to HIV. By 2008, not long after his donation, Brown had been deemed “cured” by his doctors.
In 2011, Brown said that he had ceased taking his HIV medicine the day he got the transfusion and had not taken any since. According to AP, he passed away in 2020 after a recurrence of his cancer. Up until his passing, Brown showed no signs of having HIV.
Adam Castillejo, age 40, was given a bone marrow transfusion to cure his Hodgkin’s disease, which had previously been incurable. His HIV has eradicated in 2019 thanks to a donor carrying the gene.
For two additional cases, recent studies have shown encouraging outcomes. In 2022, the American Journal of Managed Care reported that a patient who received a stem cell transfusion in 2019 to treat acute myelogenous leukemia had been in remission from HIV since 2019. A New York hospital, Weill Cornell Medical, reported last year that a patient with HIV who had undergone a cell transfer to cure cancer was deemed virus-free.
Nature Medicine says that people with HIV who don’t also have leukemia probably won’t get this treatment. The possibility that a patient’s stem cells can change to have the gene necessary to prevent HIV, eliminating the need for a donor, is being tested by scientists.
