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Medicine Science

5th Person Confirmed To Be Cured of HIV 72

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Researchers are announcing that a 53-year-old man in Germany has been cured of HIV. From a report: Referred to as "the Dusseldorf patient" to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time. Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago. "It's really cure, and not just, you know, long term remission," said Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen, who presented details of the case in a new publication in "Nature Medicine."

"This obviously positive symbol makes hope, but there's a lot of work to do," Jensen said. For most people, HIV is a lifelong infection, and the virus is never fully eradicated. Thanks to modern medication, people with HIV can live long and healthy lives. The Dusseldorf patient joins a small group of people who have been cured under extreme circumstances after a stem cell transplant, typically only performed in cancer patients who don't have any other options. A stem cell transplant is a high-risk procedure that effectively replaces a person's immune system. The primary goal is to cure someone's cancer, but the procedure has also led to an HIV cure in a handful of cases.
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5th Person Confirmed To Be Cured of HIV

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  • He does not do it again ..

    • I highly doubt he will. He's 53, so from an older generation that got HIV in an era when it wasnt as well understood how to avoid getting it and before PREP. But by now. he'd understand it *very* well. HIV is a disease that preys on the ignorant. That aint this guy.

      After living under a potential death sentence for most of his adult life, I highly doubt he's in a hurry to get back under that dark cloud.

      • He's 53, so from an older generation that

        ... lost dozens of their friends (if not lovers) to AIDS. That sort of thing kind-of sticks in the memory. Hell, I lost at least 6 friends, and I only had social contact with the gay scene in the 80s and 90s. Still got 3 friends on antiretrovirals.

        After living under a potential death sentence for most of his adult life,

        Even with combined therapies, my several friends consider it a death sentence. They just don't know when it's going to become active. Life, as the say

  • Scorched Earth (Score:4, Interesting)

    by charon69 ( 458608 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @10:30AM (#63311155)

    Logically, this makes sense to me.

    They developed "good enough" antivirals that HIV becomes undetectable. However, if you go off said meds, it eventually comes back, because HIV is *VERY* good at hiding within your immune T-Cells.

    So you still take the meds until you're undetectable... then they nuke your entire immune system as scorched earth to ensure they got it all... then stick in a new immune system.

    Why *WOULDN'T* this work?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Replacing your immune system is pretty drastic, but potentially useful for treating a lot of auto-immune conditions too. Hopefully the treatment gets less drastic over time.

    • Why *WOULDN'T* this work?

      Because we don't know ALL the places in the body where the virus can hide, before coming out to re-infect the patient.

      Actually, we probably don't need to know all the places it can hide. Just the places where it has a 50% chance of coming out per century.

      If we extend the human life span, we might need to extend that to tissues where it has a 10% chance of coming out per century.

      It's not a scaleable solution. There are a lot of tissues in the human body - and even more cell types.

    • The problem with a virus is it's like a computer virus (irony). We tend to think of it as a malicious agent, but that's more like a bacteria. Many viruses and HIV in particular are more like malicious genetic material. What that means is it transcribes it's own genetic material into your DNA. Now DNA isn't always active; parts of it are just sitting there, then become active at certain points. HIV can do this; it can sit as part of your genome inactive, not transcribing itself, and then it can become ac
    • Yup, makes great sense, unless you’ve seen someone go through an actual stem cell transplant. They don’t call it your “second birthday” for nothing. Until we get better at understanding how those actually work and reduce some of the risk, the value is debatable. Now, it’s only debatable because HIV patients can take medications that make their viral load undetectable ( to the point where unprotected sex is deemed no risk). So the choice is between managing it for life with low-

    • You don't need to 100% nuke the immune system, 99% might be good enough. I'm not even sure we can 100% nuke the immune system unless you compromise on what you mean by 100%, nuke, and immune system. The place this whole thing can go wonky is the expectation that a mutated CCR5 receptor is good enough to block the virus from entering immune cells. The fact is that some strains of the virus, under evolutionary pressure, can enter cells via CXCR-4 instead.. so the hope is that CXCR-4 is weaker enough of an ent

  • This was a blatantly obvious cure. Destroying the immune system with chemo therapy and then replacing the defective cells with cells from a donor with natural immunity seemed obvious 10-20 years ago when stem cell therapy began kicking off. Take cells from person with natural immunity (we've known about the natural immunity since the 1980's) + put patient through chemotherapy to destroy defective cells + IV stem cell treatment with immune cells = HIV Cure and a cure for a whole lot of other diseases

    • Given that your complaints are now decades old, you should really start to understand and accept what is actually obvious; The Disease of Greed that has infected mankind for thousands of years. This is why we have perpetual treatments instead of cures. Even when a "breakthrough" like this is proven viable, it won't be accepted by your insurance for the next decade or two. For the same greedy reason.

      Greed cares about perpetual treatments and the perpetual revenue streams it creates. You assume creating

      • This is why we have perpetual treatments instead of cures.

        Such as for smallpox and reinderpest? Might want to include polio in there as well. Think of the all the the money these companies have lost by wiping out the above three afflictions.

        But then, you being the most prominent scientist on the planet, why haven't you come up with cures for anything? Wouldn't that show them how it's done?

        • This is why we have perpetual treatments instead of cures. Such as for smallpox and reinderpest? Might want to include polio in there as well. Think of the all the the money these companies have lost by wiping out the above three afflictions.

          It took 20 years to develop a polio vaccine that still has not eradicated it from the planet. All those companies made plenty of money, and still do. If polio took 20 years, imagine how long Greed will insist development continues with COVID vaccines regardless of efficacy.

          You don't tack on $9 trillion in debt by calling the headless guy a mere decapitation. You get to $9 trillion in debt by ensuring the headless guy tests positive for COVID to capture maximum financial reimbursement from Government coffe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        This is why we have perpetual treatments instead of cures. Even when a "breakthrough" like this is proven viable, it won't be accepted by your insurance for the next decade or two.

        We have very different definitions of "viable". Immune system replacement involves three to four weeks of hospitalization. Assuming the treatment is comparable in cost to similar treatments for leukemia, the one-year cost, including follow-ups, additional treatment when things go wrong, etc. is on the order of $352,885 to $457,078 [nih.gov].

        It is easy to understand why insurance companies would be wary of paying for a cure that approaches half a million dollars rather than spending O($2k) per month for antiretrovir

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by edwdig ( 47888 )

      Yeah, it's an obvious cure, but it's also INCREDIBLY risky. They have to completely 100% kill off every trace of your immune system, then implant someone else's into you. Then it takes time for the new immune system to ramp up and be able to protect you.

      You've got a significant window there where you have no immune system at all. If anyone so much as sneezes near you then, you probably die.

      And of course you need to find another person who's compatible enough with you for a transfer to work. And the process

    • The place this whole thing can go wonky is the expectation that a mutated CCR5 receptor is good enough to block the virus from entering immune cells. The fact is that some strains of the virus, under evolutionary pressure, can enter cells via CXCR-4 instead.. so the hope is that CXCR-4 is weaker enough of an entry point than CCR5 that the immune system can fight back against the virus more efficiently than the virus can enter the immune cells and weaken the immune system. Unlike CCR5, CXCR-4 might actually

  • It would seem that god isn't making punishments like he used to.

  • Not just a transplant (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @11:44AM (#63311407)

    The key to the cure isn't the transplant as much as the transplant donor, FTA:

    All four of these patients had undergone stem cell transplants for their blood cancer treatment. Their donors also had the same HIV-resistant mutation that deletes a protein called CCR5, which HIV normally uses to enter the cell. Only 1% of the total population carries this genetic mutation that makes them resistant to HIV.

    Presumably the donor in this case had the same mutation.

  • Exciting but almost zero (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @12:21PM (#63311573) Homepage Journal

    It's exciting that this is possible. But 5 out of about 80 million in history is not a great recovery rate. It does bring up a lot of questions like why are so few cased cured, and what are the mechanism(s) of cures and remissions?

    • It's not really a cure. It's a replacement of the bone marrow cells that generate t-cells with somebody else's cells, so the patient has to take transplant antirejection drugs for the rest of their life. Only so few cases because it has only been done on people that were getting bone marrow transplants for Leukemia anyway, so they would have need to take the antirejection meds anyway. When they can do it without creating the need for antirejection meds, then it's actually a cure.

    • It does bring up a lot of questions like why are so few cased cured

      Because we don't have a time machine, and we can't use modern medical innovation to go back in time and erase the number you are comparing it against?

      Seriously between you and the guy at the top who doesn't understand why scientists said we are heading towards an ice age, it seems like the only people on Slashdot this morning do not understand the concept of time at all.

      • I understand time, but I didn't have the numbers to state how many HIV cases occurred in the last four years. I'm guessing it's several orders of magnitude more than 5. I get it, numbers are hard. My recommendation to you is to try harder.

  • They don't have to take antiretrovirals for the rest of their life, but they do have to take transplant rejection drugs... is that really a "cure"?

    Get back to me when they can use CRISPR to add the HIV immunity DNA to the person's own cells without his body rejecting them. That would be a real cure.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • That's exactly what I was saying. Many conditions like HIV and diabetes are manageable by continuing medication now. but still not curable. Some say that is because there is more financial incentive to provide medication for the rest of the patient's life than to cure their condition completely and receive no more income from them.
  • You gotta monetized the patient, neverending treatments or medication achieves that.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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