The second patient in Berlin, the seventh case of HIV cure in the world

BarcelonaThere are now seven people in the world who have been cured of HIV. The seventh is a man known as the second patient in Berlin, who received a positive diagnosis for the virus in 2009 and another for leukemia in 2015. To treat the cancer, the patient received a stem cell transplant from a donor, a therapy that had previously resulted in the undetectable presence of HIV in the blood of a few other HIV-positive individuals. However, in all previous cases of cure, the donors were homozygous, meaning they had two identical copies of a gene whose mutation is considered protective against the virus. This time, however, researchers from the Berlin Institute of Health and the University of Berlin have managed to cure the patient using cells from a donor who only had one of the two copies with the mutation, suggesting that the pool of donors with the potential to eliminate HIV could be larger than expected.

The journal Nature The results of the study describing the cure of this 60-year-old German man are published this Monday; six years after his transplant, the virus is still not detected in his blood. The patients who inaugurated the short list of those cured of HIV were Timothy Ray Brown, known as the Berlin patient, in 2011, and a year later Adam Castillejo, the London patientBoth received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare mutation called CCR5 Delta32, which, however, has not worked in other cases. Most previous patients were cured after receiving transplants from donors homozygous for a mutation in the CCR5 gene, which is considered protective against the virus. Now, the study authors describe the seventh case of remission in a 60-year-old man with leukemia. The donor, in this case, had only one of the two copies with the mutation, suggesting that the pool of donors with the potential to clear HIV could be larger. Alternative strategies

For Javier Martínez-Picado, a member of the IciStem consortium, co-directed by the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute in Barcelona and the University Medical Center Utrecht (Netherlands), and responsible for several HIV cure cases, this study is "a very detailed and high-quality piece of work" that confirms previously published cases of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from a donor. And although this type of medical intervention is reserved "exclusively" for people with a serious hematological disease, "alternative strategies are being explored," he stated in an interview with Science Mèdia Center (SMC).

The last cure case before this one, known aspatient from Geneva, She became the first person in the world to be cured of HIV by receiving a stem cell transplant from cells that did not carry the CCR5Δ32 mutation, one of the genetic mutations responsible for both types of resistance the body can offer against HIV infection. The study, led by the University Hospital of Geneva and the Pasteur Institute, was conducted within the framework of the IciStem consortium, co-coordinated by IrsiCaixa and Utrecht University. Martínez-Picado emphasizes that in both cases, the donor and recipient did not carry the mutation and are in remission.