If HIV threatens your sexual health and wellbeing, a bone marrow transplant may be the cure. This is according to results from two patients, presented at the International Aids Society Conference, who have been taken off their HIV anti-retroviral drugs after bone-marrow transplants seemed to clear the virus from their bodies. While the team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in the US, caution that it is far too soon to talk about a cure as the virus could return at any point, one of the patients has spent nearly four months without taking medication with no sign of the virus re-affecting his wellness.
According to Dr Timothy Henrich, ‘We have not demonstrated cure, we’re going to need longer follow-up. What we can say is if the virus does stay away for a year or even two years after we stopped the treatment, that the chances of the virus rebounding are going to be extremely low. It’s much too early at this point to use the C-word [cure].’ The doctors believe that the course of anti-retrovirals initially protected the transplanted bone marrow from infection, while attacking the remaining bone marrow, which was harbouring the virus. However, HIV could be still hide inside your brain tissue or the gastrointestinal track. Dr Henrich cautioned, ‘If [the] virus does return, it would suggest that these other sites are an important reservoir of infectious virus and new approaches to measuring the reservoir at relevant sites will be needed to guide the development of HIV curative strategies.’
Dr Michael Brady, the medical director of the Terrence Higgins Trust, noted, ‘It is too early to know whether HIV has been eradicated from these men’s bodies or whether it might return. However, the case suggests that what happened to Timothy Brown, the Berlin Patient was perhaps not a one-off. A bone marrow transplant is a complex and expensive procedure, which comes with significant risks. For most people with HIV, it would be more dangerous to undergo a transplant than to continue managing the virus with daily medication. So while this is by no means a workable cure, it does give researchers another signpost in the direction of one.”
The head of the Foundation for AIDS Research, Kevin Frost, commented, ‘These findings clearly provide important new information that might well alter the current thinking about HIV and gene therapy. While stem-cell transplantation is not a viable option for people with HIV on a broad scale because of its costs and complexity, these new cases could lead us to new approaches to treating, and ultimately even eradicating, HIV.’
Comments are closed.