ABOVE: CCR5 receptor (yellow) in cell membrane (gray)
WIKIMEDIA, THOMAS SPLETTSTOESSER
For the second time, a person living with HIV appears to have cleared the virus after a stem cell transplant replaced his infected immune cells with donor cells resistant to infection, scientists report in Nature today (March 5). The patient has been in remission for 18 months despite not having taken anti-retroviral medications, indicating that the intervention might have cured the disease.
“I feel a sense of responsibility to help the doctors understand how it happened so they can develop the science,” the anonymous “London patient” tells The New York Times in an email.
Like Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to have been cured of HIV, the London patient required a bone marrow transplant to treat cancer. Brown, also known as the Berlin patient, had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, while the London patient had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Their ...
