A Cure for HIV?

(Posted by Nick, '11)
Doctors at Berlin’s Charité Hospital may have found a way to cure patients testing positive for HIV. In recent years, it has become apparent that those that have a mutation in the CCR5 gene are in fact immune to HIV. This is well-documented in Africa, where scientists have noted that many prostitutes are exposed to HIV multiple times, yet do not get infected. It is this mutation that has apparently cured a man of the virus.

The patient, a 42-year-old American, had been infected with HIV for a decade. After years of undergoing antiretroviral treatments, he was diagnosed with leukemia. To treat him, doctors in Berlin specifically sought out a bone marrow donor that carried the CCR5 mutation. Two years after having the bone marrow transplant, the man still tests negative for HIV.

Speaking to the British newspaper The Independent, Dr. Hutter of the Charité Hospital said, “It is the longest time someone who has had antiretroviral therapy and stopped has lasted without the virus rebounding. Normally it rebounds within weeks. It is the closest we have come to a cure.”

The article goes on: “Dr Hutter said a bone marrow transplant would be too risky as a routine treatment for HIV and too difficult to find donors with the right genetic make-up. But a modification of the approach using gene therapy to render a patient HIV-resistant could work, he said.”

Though this doesn’t provide for a definitive cure of the disease, as there are other tissues, such as the brain and the liver, in which the virus could hide, it certainly gives hope to the millions of people infected with HIV and AIDS that we are close to finding a cure.

You can read the entire article here.