Cure for HIV?

Imagine having lived with HIV for over a decade and then finding out that you have been cured of the disease? That is what happened to one American after having a bone marrow transplant to help treat his leukemia. Some critics are worried that the virus might be lying dormant and hidden in his body and may rear its ugly head again in the future, while others are hailing this new development as a huge leap in the fight against AIDS.

Since its rise as a worldwide epidemic, HIV has been transmitted to roughly 33 million people. Every year, 2 million people succumb to the disease, thus, it is no wonder that many researchers would feel great hope that this new case could hold the key literally in its genes to a possible cure. The patient’s doctor, Dr. Gero Huetter, confirmed that for over a year and a half after the bone marrow transplant, which was selected for its genetic qualities, the 42 year-old patient has not produced any positive HIV test. He admitted, “We waited every day for a bad reading.” Other doctors, including Dr. Andrew Badley who works in the HIV department at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, feel that the HIV tests need to be more thorough before a final announcement of a cure can be officially made. Badley states, “A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it’s not present.”

Bone marrow transplants have had limited success for the treatment of AIDS in the past. In fact, in the early 1980s through the mid 1990s, doctors made over 30 attempts to treat HIV with these types of transplants. Only 2 of those attempts proved successful. In the case of the American patient treated under Huetter’s care, the patient was actually getting treatment for his leukemia. Huetter’s specialty is hematology, but as he planned the bone marrow transplant for his patient, his mind raced back to something he had read a decade ago. He remembered that some people actually harbor a type of genetic mutation that prohibits HIV from invading their body. Should a patient inherit this mutation from both mother and father, HIV has no way of attaching to cells. Huetter states, “I read it in 1996, coincidentally. I remembered it and thought it might work.”

Only one of every 1,000 people of American and European descent has this mutation inherited from both mother and father. This did not stop Huetter in his quest to find a bone marrow donor that had this mutation. He ended up finding one donor that did. It was these cells from the donor that helped successfully (so far) fight off the AIDS virus. The U.S. director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, feels that a bone marrow transplant is both expensive and dangerous and should not be looked at as an all-the-time cure. However, he definitely feels that a closer focus on gene therapy and gene mutations should be made as a possible way to eliminate HIV from the body. He states, “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.”