The only human cured of HIV
In 2007, a man known as the “Berlin Patient” Timothy Ray Brown, was given a working cure for HIV. He is still the only individual who has been successfully cured of the virus, but scientists aren’t sure which part of his treatment was responsible for curing him. A new study has given some hints on this mystery and has eliminated one possibility. In 1995 Brown was diagnosed with HIV and had been taking anti-HIV drugs, or antiretroviral therapy, for 11 years in order to control his virus before he found out he had developed leukemia. Chemotherapy was given but it failed, so physicians decided to proceed in a bone marrow transplant. The treatment successfully cure him, but the virus dropped to undetectable levels in his blood and never bounced back, even though Brown stopped going to ART.
Scientists think that three different things could have played a part to the success. One, Brown was given a transplant from an individual with a rare mutation that alters one of the receptors HIV uses to get inside white blood cells. Second, Brown’s own immune system was destroyed by chemotherapy and radiation to prepare him for the transplant. This process, called conditioning, could have killed all the HIV infected cells. Finally, the cells that were transplanted could have attacked Brown’s own and destroyed any remaining HIV reservoirs.A team of researchers from the University of Atlanta conducted a study on monkeys. They removed stem cells from the bloody of three rhesus macaques and stored it for later.
They then infected the monkeys with three controls with a hybrid virus called SHIV. The monkeys were given ART. When they monkeys stopped taking their medicine, the virus came back. Kidney failure was experienced two weeks after the ART was stopped and consequently had to be euthanized. SHIV DNA was found in some circulating cells at the time of death, suggesting none of the monkeys were cured. It is most likely that the graft versus host disease, the mutation in Brown’s donor or both in combination were responsible.
