Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
- The New York Times reports that a team of scientists plan to announce tomorrow that a patient in London has been effectively cured of HIV.
- The cure reportedly was the result of a bone-marrow transplant that came with a genetic mutation that naturally blocks HIV from spreading throughout the body.
- This approach isn’t quite practical to implement on a large scale, but the knowledge gained from it will likely help scientists develop more scalable approaches.
In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown became the first person to be cured of HIV after receiving a bone marrow stem cell transplant, to treat leukemia, from someone who was naturally immune to the virus. Known as “the Berlin patient,” researchers have since tried — and failed — to replicate that incredible success in hopes of finding a permanent cure for the virus, which currently affects some 37 million people globally.
However, a team of scientists plan to announce tomorrow that a second person — known now only as the “London patient” — appears to also have been cured of the virus that causes AIDS, according to a New York Times report. The London patient is reported to have had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which doctors treated in 2016 with a bone-marrow transplant, which, like the Berlin patient, came from a donor who had a mutation in the gene for CCR5, which rendered them naturally immune to HIV (About 1 percent of people who descend from Northern Europeans carry this mutation and are immune to HIV).
“[It] shows the cure of Timothy Brown was not a fluke and can be recreated,” Keith Jerome of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in…
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