The Official Reults of the Stem Cell Transplant Patient: No Signs of HIV
“A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. ‘The patient is fine,’ said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. ‘Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.’ The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal.” [CNN]
A cure for HIV infection? Maybe this the beginning….
holy crap, that’s amazing, wonderful news. wow. I hope this pans out.
im off to the bath house to receive a big chunky load in my ass. SELL A BRAY SHON TIME COME ON!
I’ve been following this story for a while and it is great but I don’t think this’ll be the way forward. As they say in the article a third of people die during the transplant and that assuming they can find an acceptable donor. There are other factors but they explain it better in the referenced article.
“Here’s where the German doctors admit they were very lucky. They told reporters they normally find one to five qualified donors for their patients in need of a transplant. In this case they found 80 donors. So they systematically tested each donor for the mutation and when they came to the 61st potential donor they hit the jackpot. Nearly two years after the bone marrow transplant, the patient is still in remission from his cancer and he doesn’t seem to have any detectable HIV either.”
http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.....-for-aids/
this IS great news — but we should definitely still maintain focus on prevention, since infection rates continue to rise. and, when drug cocktailing first came out, some of those patients showed zero viral load for awhile; viruses are much smaller than cells, and can remain hidden and dormant in various nooks and crannies.
but i’m still hopeful — yay, science! :)
The receptor being blocked isn’t the only receptor HIV can use to attach to the CD4 cell, so the highly dangerous procedure wouldn’t necessarily be effective for everyone living with HIV. Also, while the the virus is undetectable in the patient’s blood, it can still be found in his lymph nodes as current treatments are still unable to eradicate these viral reservoirs. While I certainly wish him the best, I think that its entirely possible that his HIV could mutate (as HIV likes to do), find a different CD4 receptor to utilize and come back in full force. Still, I feel that this shows a lot of potential and promise in terms of future “bio-cures” as opposed to a manufactured pharmaceutical drug.
Yeah…I don’t know. I guess I’ll remain optimistic about this case, but truth be told, I’ve been Poz for just over 12 years and have been “undetectable” for just as long. I started taking a bunch of pills, but science as been great and am only down to one a day. Never been sick, never have had to be hospitalized, or have had any internal or physical side effects from the pills I’ve taken. I guess I consider myself lucky in that I’ve been able to sustain this well for this long. But I do agree with some of the comments here. I don’t necessarily think this is “THE” cure, but rather a step in the right direction.
But then again, there’s too much money to be made with HIV/Aids by the pharmaceutical companies to ever really find “THAT” cure.
Does this mean that once there is a cure for HIV from a blood transplant there will be more men becoming gay. It’s an act against God’s intention of marriage.