A seventh person has been deemed HIV-free following a stem cell transplant, but he's only the second to be treated with stem cells not resistant to the virus, according a July 26th report from Nature.
"I am quite surprised that it worked," Ravindra Gupta, PhD, a microbiologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who led a team that treated one of the other people who is now free of HIV, said in the report. "It's a big deal," Dr. Gupta said.
The first person to be free of HIV after a bone marrow transplant was treated for blood cancer. He and several others received special donor stem cells that carried a mutation for a receptor called CCR5, which is used by most HIV virus strains to enter immune cells. This was believed to be the best way to target HIV and cure the disease, but the latest patient turns that on its head.
The case was presented at the 25th International AIDS Conference in Munich, Germany. The 60-year-old patient received stem cells from a donor who only had one copy of the mutated gene and at a lower level than usual.
The case shows that CCR5 is not everything in curing HIV, the report said.