Doctors in Germany say that an HIV-positive patient given a bone marrow transplant appears to have been cured of his HIV infection. The patient, a 42-year-old American man living in Germany, received the transplant to treat leukemia and nearly two years later shows no sign of either HIV infection or cancer. The doctors stressed that this may be an unusual case and further investigation is needed to confirm the results.

While bone marrow transplants have been explored as a way to treat HIV infections in the past, this time the researchers used a new twist. They sought out a bone marrow donor who had a rare genetic mutation that seems to make people resistant to HIV infection. About one in 1000 Europeans and Americans inherits the Delta 32 mutation from both parents, which turns off a protein called CCR5 that the HIV virus needs to infect cells.

A bone marrow transplant involves administering high doses of radiation to kill off the patient’s own infected bone marrow cells and disable the immune system, then replacing it with donor bone marrow. The treatment is very risky and can be fatal as often as 20 to 30 percent of the time. As a result, bone marrow transplants are unlikely to become first-line treatments for HIV infections. However, the finding that it may be possible to induce HIV resistance by mutating CCR5 opens the door for similar studies using techniques such as gene therapy.

To find out more about HIV infection, visit the Healia Health Community for HIV/AIDS.

_{Photo: C. Goldsmith, Wikipedia, Creative Commons}