Cancer Patient Bone Marrow Transplant Accidently Cures AIDS

A cancer patient that had the common late-stage bone marrow transplant given to leukemia sufferers may have accidentally been cured of HIV-AIDS.  His doctor, Dr. Gero Hutler isn’t an AIDS specialist but apparently selected a donor who had a rare genetic mutation that renders people virtually HIV immune.

The 42-year-old American man living in Berlin, Germany was given the usual radiation and chemotherapy that kills off many of the immune cells that can harbor HIV. He was then transplanted and his immune system was re-populated by the cells that were created by the donor’s bone marrow.

This bodes well for stem cell research and the use of gene therapy in the treatment of diseases. The donor had a mutation that creates immune system, present in about 1% of all Europeans, that lack a receptor molecule called CCR5. Since this receptor plays a role in HIV’s ability to enter the cell, the patient’s immune system was re-populated with immune cells that carried the mutation.

Nearly 600 days later, the transplant seems to have resulted in the absence of any trace of HIV in this man’s body in spite of not taking any AIDS drugs since the transplant.  While this is a single case study and unknown factors could be at work, researchers hope to apply the lessons of this case to the strategy of inducing the protective mutation in HIV patients.

Nobel Prize winner for research on tumor viruses, David Baltimore has started a new company to use gene therapy to target HIV and is encouraged by this case study as a good sign for gene therapy approaches to HIV patients.  Several innovative procedures and different approaches are being tested by researchers at City of Hope cancer center in Duarte, California by John Rossi and colleagues using genetically altered HIV itself in treatment.