The transplant served as a leukemia and HIV treatment.
After receiving a stem cell transplant, a 66-year-old man may be the fifth person to be cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, researchers reported Wednesday . The patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, is the oldest person yet to undergo the procedure and enter long-term remission from the disease.
Just the year before, in March 1987, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first antiretroviral therapy, or medication for HIV, called azidothymidine , according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases . It wasn't until the mid-1990s that combination therapies for HIV would come into use; these therapies combined two to three HIV drugs to boost the efficacy of the treatment and help prevent patients from developing resistance to the drugs.
Following the man's transplant, these mutant, HIV-resistant cells steadily took over his immune system. In March 2021, under the careful supervision of his medical team, the patient stopped taking antiretroviral medications, and to date, there have been no signs of HIV replication in his body. The Berlin patient, who later revealed his name to be Timothy Ray Brown, also developed AML and received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with an HIV-resistant genetic mutation. Two others — the Düsseldorf and London patients — were cured using the same procedure, according to NBC News, and recently, one woman was cured after receiving a stem cell transplant that used cells from umbilical cord blood, Live Science previously reported.
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