Longtime HIV Patient Is Effectively Cured After Stem Cell Transplant Mark Johnson - The Washington Post
go to original July 28, 2022

HIV Cured in Oldest Patient Yet After Stem Cell Transplant (MED IT)

A 66-year-old man with HIV is in long-term remission after receiving a transplant of blood stem cells containing a rare mutation, raising the prospect that doctors may someday be able to use gene editing to re-create the mutation and cure patients of the virus that causes AIDS, a medical team announced Wednesday.

For now, the crucial virus-defeating mutation is rare, leaving the treatment unavailable to the vast majority of the 38 million patients living with HIV, including over 1.2 million in the United States. Bone marrow transplants also carry significant risk and have been used only on HIV patients who have developed cancer.

The patient, who had lived more than half his life with the virus, is among a handful of people who went into remission after receiving stem cells from a donor with the rare mutation, said doctors from City of Hope, a cancer and research center in Duarte, Calif., who treated him.

“This is one step in the long road to cure,” said William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor, who founded the university’s cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments. Haseltine, now chairman and president of the nonprofit think tank Access Health International, was not involved in the City of Hope case.

While the announcement at the 24th International AIDS Conference in Montreal does not have immediate implications for most people living with HIV, it continues the long, slow progression of treatment that began with federal approval of the drug AZT in 1987, advanced a decade later with the use of protease inhibitors to reduce the virus in the body, and went further in 2012, with the approval of PrEP, which protects healthy people from becoming infected.

As a result of those developments, an HIV patient diagnosed at around age 20 today can receive antiretroviral therapy and live another 54 years, according to a 2017 study in the journal AIDS.

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Related: Fourth Patient Seemingly Cured of HIV Through Wild Coincidence (Good News Network)

Related: H.I.V. Infections Remain Persistently High, U.N. Reports (The New York Times)

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