HIV Cure on the Horizon

A man is cured, doctors are stunned and patients have new hope. It could be the cure for HIV. It worked on one man in Germany and now a San Francisco company is trying to do replicate the results in the United States.

“We have this patient in Berlin who develops leukemia, gets a bone marrow transplant from donor who has a genetic anomaly, he lacks CCR5 genes. It turns out CCR5 is the key doorway for HIV to get into the cell,” explains Quest Research’s Dr. Jacob Lalezari.

Now, four years later with no other treatment that patient is HIV free. The goal now is to replicate what happened in Berlin.

Doctors in Germany gave a patient a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia. The patient also was HIV-positive so doctors selected a donor known to have a specific gene mutation, known for blocking HIV from entering cells.

The risky transplant involves killing off a patient’s unhealthy bone marrow and all the white blood cells, leaving the patient without an immune system until doctors infuse donated stem cells to rebuild the bone marrow which can then produce healthy cells.

Because the stem cells that were introduced in an HIV-postive U.S. man in his 40s contained the HIV-blocking mutation, the healthy cells became resistant to HIV and wiped out the virus in the process.

Scientists have discovered it’s relatively easy to remove HIV from the bloodstream but it tends to lurk in the brain, gut and lymphatic tissue.

This breakthrough has eradicated the virus from the patient’s entire body.

Experts at Quest Research are removing CCR5 from patients genes, replicating them and then putting them back. Dr. Lalezari says without CCR5 the virus can’t infect new cells and it eventually goes away.

Only time will tell if the new treatment can actually cure patients. So far Quest Research is treating ten patients with the gene therapy and experts call their results encouraging.

Professor Basil Donovan from the University of New South Wales in Australia says, “There is no guarantee that it would work in everyone you did it in, but the fact that it worked at all is encouraging.”

Dr. Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham in England says, “This is the first time the mutated gene has been harnessed to cure HIV infection.”

Doctors warn that this one case is an outlier and should by no means be viewed as a panacea to cure everyone living with HIV. The procedure itself kills about 30 percent of patients and is very expensive.

But experts are nevertheless blown away by this case, which you can read more about in the December issue of the journal, Blood.