Researchers report that a man with HIV, dubbed the "London patient," appears to have been cured of the infection following a bone marrow transplant.
He is the second known person to experience sustained remission from HIV; the first man, Timothy Ray Brown, was cured 12 years ago. In both cases, the men had cancer and were treated with bone marrow from a donor with the CCR5 mutation; CCR5 is a protein HIV uses to enter certain immune cells.
The London patient underwent the transplant in May 2016, and in September 2017, he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs. He is tested often, and his HIV viral load is undetectable. He asked to remain anonymous, but told The New York Times that hearing he could be cured of cancer and HIV was "overwhelming" and "surreal," as he "never thought that there would be a cure during my lifetime."
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Since Brown's case, several people with cancer and HIV have been treated with bone marrow transplants, but in other cases, the virus came back about nine months after they stopped taking their antiretroviral drugs or they died of cancer. While it's not guaranteed that the London patient won't ever have HIV again, researchers are optimistic. "This will inspire people that a cure is not a dream," Dr. Annemarie Wensing, a virologist at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, told the Times. "It's reachable."
A report on the London patient will be published Tuesday in the journal Nature.
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