Marrow Transplant May Hold AIDS Cure

German hematologist Gero Huetter speaks during a news conference about a successful treatment of an HIV-infected patient.

Michael Sohn, AP Photo

An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said.

While researchers and doctors caution that the case might just be a fluke, others say it may inspire more interest in gene therapy to fight the deadly disease, which claims two million lives each year.

Black Voices has more on this discovery:

Dr. Gero Huetter said his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. Huetter's patient was under treatment for both AIDS and leukemia, which developed unrelated to HIV.

As Huetter -- who is a hematologist, not an HIV specialist -- prepared to treat the patient's leukemia with a bone marrow transplant, he recalled that some people carry a genetic mutation that seems to make them resistant to HIV infection. If the mutation, called Delta 32, is inherited from both parents, it prevents HIV from attaching itself to cells by blocking CCR5, a receptor that acts as a kind of gateway.

"I read it in 1996, coincidentally," Huetter told reporters at the medical school. "I remembered it and thought it might work."

Before the transplant, the patient endured powerful drugs and radiation to kill off his own infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system -- a treatment fatal to between 20 and 30 percent of recipients.

He was also taken off the potent drugs used to treat his AIDS. Huetter's team feared that the drugs might interfere with the new marrow cells' survival. They risked lowering his defenses in the hopes that the new, mutated cells would reject the virus on their own.

"It helps prove the concept that if somehow you can block the expression of CCR5, maybe by gene therapy, you might be able to inhibit the ability of the virus to replicate," Fauci said.

Even for the patient in Berlin, the lack of a clear understanding of exactly why his AIDS has disappeared means his future is far from certain.

"The virus is wily," Huetter said. "There could always be a resurgence."

If this does indeed prove true, will it come quicker to those with access? Africa is inundated with AIDS cases, but would they be last in line to get "the cure," due to a lack of resources?

Geoffrey Gardner

Tags: AIDS | Gero Huetter | HIV | luekemia | miracle AIDS cure

1:18 PM ET | 11-14-2008 | permalink

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