According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are approximately 40 million people currently living with HIV worldwide. Over 600 thousand people died of HIV-related illnesses last year, and countless more are expected to die in the foreseeable future. Those odds may change, however, thanks to a promising new treatment. A German man recently became the 7th person to be cured of this disease after receiving a stem cell transplant.
New Scientist has reported that a formerly HIV-positive German man, referred to as Berlin 2 (B2) received a stem cell transplant to treat an aggressive type of leukemia. Interestingly, the transplant had an unexpected side effect: this treatment cured the HIV he had been living with for years.
How Does this Treatment Work?
Scientists have been treating patients with HIV-resistant stem cells, believing that they were essential for putting the disease into remission. The cell donors carried mutations in both copies of a gene encoding CCR5 protein. This is the protein that HIV uses to infect immune cells. Since this approach resulted in significant disease resistance and remission, the scientists concluded that the cure revolved around using two copies of this gene mutation. After all, this double-copy approach had successfully removed CCR5 protein from immune cells in five patients.
Interestingly, the donor stem cells that the Berlin2 patient received only contained one copy of this gene mutation. Until now, scientists believed that single-copy cells like these only conferred short-lived resistance. Since two people have now been cured of the virus with single-copy cells, this challenged the original assumption that two copies were needed for a cure.
Christian Gaebler is the foremost physician-scientist promoting HIV research at the Free University of Berlin. His response to this breakthrough was: “Seeing that a cure is possible without this resistance gives us more options for curing HIV.”
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HIV is No Longer a Death Sentence
Just 30 years ago, an HIV diagnosis was essentially a death sentence. Since the late 1980s, it’s estimated that over 100 million people have been infected with it, with approximately half of those dying of virus-related health issues. Fortunately, effective antivirals have significantly reduced the death toll in recent years. This has transformed the disease from a fatal infection to a chronic health condition.
With this new breakthrough in stem cell treatment, the future is looking even brighter for those infected with the illness.
For more information on this treatment, visit the MedScape website.
Featured Image: HIV-infected H9 T-cell, by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), 2011, public domain licence