Blood cancer and AIDS were cured with one operation
Miracles in medicine: the story of a happy escape from a deadly virus
Tatiana Bateneva, "News of Science"
Miracles happen even in medicine. This is now known by an American who was treated for blood cancer in Berlin. By transplanting the bone marrow of a special donor, the doctors also saved him from AIDS. Both he and the attending doctor will not come to their senses with joy.
We have already heard a lot of stories about a happy escape from a deadly virus. But there was no doubt that until now they were from the field of artistic whistling - so the ends did not fit with the ends.
The 42-year-old American was treated at the Berlin clinic "Charite" for leukemia. But hematologist Hero Hutter deliberately chose a donor with a special mutation of the Delta 32 gene to transplant his bone marrow. It does not allow the immunodeficiency virus to penetrate the immune cells of the human body. Among Europeans, about 1% of the population has such a mutation, among us Russians - about 4%. But among the inhabitants of South America, Asia and Africa, it practically does not occur. Since leukocytes (cells of the immune system) are created in the bone marrow, their transplantation can theoretically make a person resistant to HIV infection. In addition, before the transplant, the patient underwent the usual course of radiation and drug therapy in such cases, which kills his own bone marrow cells and the immune system. And for more than 600 days, the virus has not been detected in his tests, although he does not even take the usual set of AIDS medications. Will this success become a new milestone in the fight of scientists around the world against a deadly infection?
- This is very encouraging information, - Professor Andrey Kozlov, head of the Biomedical Center of St. Petersburg, one of the developers of the domestic AIDS vaccine, commented on the news for Izvestia. - Now the factors of genetic resistance to HIV are being actively studied all over the world. Yes, our people are naturally more resistant to the immunodeficiency virus. Perhaps this explains the fact that in the 70-80-ies we did not have a large-scale AIDS epidemic, as in the USA, although at that time our contacts with Africa were very wide. All this requires study.
Of course, there is not enough bone marrow from donors for all infected people. But their stem cells may be able to be cloned - and then...
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14.11.2008