HIV retrovirusWIKIMEDIA, PHD DRE
Physician-scientists reported in July that two male patients had stopped anti-retroviral therapy and were HIV-free after bone-marrow transplants that occurred in 2008 in one man and 2010 in the second. Now, the scientists have announced that HIV is back in both patients.
“It’s disappointing and very sobering,” virologist Deborah Persaud of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, Maryland, told Nature News.
The men were given high-risk bone-marrow transplants to treat blood cancer and had no detectable levels of HIV in their blood eight months post-transplant. They each stopped taking anti-retroviral drugs earlier this year and did not test positive for HIV for months. Timothy Henrich of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of the patients’ physicians, said today in a statement that one ...
