Stem cells cured two more AIDS patients

Blood stem cell transplant saves from HIV

Kirill Stasevich, Compulenta

Until recently, medicine could boast of only two cases when patients managed to get rid of HIV: this is Timothy Ray Brown (aka the "Berlin patient") – the only adult cured of AIDS, and a two-year-old girl who was rid of the virus thanks to early treatment.

Now it looks like two more will be added to these lucky ones. At the conference of the International Society for HIV Research, currently taking place in Kuala Lumpur, Daniel Kuritzkes and his colleagues from Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston (USA) reported that they managed to expel the virus from the body of two adult patients, and this was done with the help of stem cell transplantation.

One of the "Boston patients" had a bone marrow transplant three years ago, the other five years ago. Now they have stopped receiving antiretroviral drugs (one has not used them for 15 weeks, the other for 7 weeks), and no traces of viral DNA or RNA have appeared in their blood. However, the researchers themselves say that a full recovery can be said in at least a year, since HIV can hide in the body. In general, it will take some more time before it will be possible to celebrate the victory.

HIV particles are preparing to be released (photo by Dr. David Phillips)

Stem cell transplantation was also done to the "Berlin patient", but there was one significant difference in the Boston version of therapy.

In Berlin, the patient was also injected with blood stem cells, but at the same time they carried the mutant CCR5 protein, which HIV needs to enter the cell. That is, these stem cells initially had resistance to the virus. In Boston, ordinary stem cells were transplanted, without any antiviral mutations, acting according to the rules of anticancer therapy, since patients, in addition to AIDS, also had lymphoma. That is, the only protection against the virus were conventional antiretroviral drugs.

Scientists believe that the reason for the miraculous escape from the virus was that the transplanted cells absorbed the host cells affected by the virus, and thereby destroyed potential reservoirs of HIV.

The results obtained in Boston also suggest that antiretroviral therapy is quite effective on its own, without additional support from gene therapy – after all, the transplanted cells in this case did not carry any special mutations.

On the other hand, stem cell transplantation is not the safest procedure, so if you really make a cure for AIDS out of it, you need to think about how to reduce the immune risks associated with bone marrow transplantation.

Prepared based on the materials of Nature News: Stem-cell transplants may purge HIV.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 04.07.2013