Seventh person with HIV is CURED after stem cell transplant for leukaemia, scientists claim

A 60-year-old German man has likely been ‘cured’ of HIV, in a medical milestone only achieved by six other people, doctors announce.

The man was treated for acute myeloid leukemia — a type of blood cancer that starts in young white blood cells in the bone marrow — with a stem cell transplant.

The painful and risky procedure is for people who have both HIV and aggressive leukaemia, so is not an option for almost all of the nearly 40 million people living with the deadly virus across the world.

He now appears to be both cancer and HIV free, according to doctors.

The German man, who remains anonymous, was dubbed the ‘next Berlin patient’.

Timothy Ray Brown with his dog, Jack, on Treasure Island in San Francisco in 2011. Brown, who was known for years as the Berlin patient, had a transplant in Germany from a donor with natural resistance to the AIDS virus. It was thought to have cured Brown’s leukemia and HIV.

The original Berlin patient, Timothy Ray Brown, was the first person declared cured of HIV back in 2008. Brown died from cancer in 2020.

The second man from Berlin to achieve long-term HIV remission was announced ahead of the 25th International AIDS Conference being held in the German city of Munich next week.

He was first diagnosed with HIV in 2009, according to the research abstract being presented at the conference.

The man received a bone marrow transplant for his leukaemia in 2015. The procedure, which has a 10 per cent risk of death, essentially replaces a person’s immune system.

Then he stopped taking anti-retroviral drugs — which reduce the amount of HIV in the blood — in late 2018.

Nearly six years later, he appears to be both HIV and cancer free, the medical researchers said.

Christian Gaebler, a doctor-researcher at Berlin’s Charite university hospital treating the patient, said the team cannot be ‘absolutely certain’ every last trace of HIV has been eradicated.

But ‘the patient’s case is highly suggestive of an HIV cure,’ Gaebler added.

‘He feels well and is enthusiastic about contributing to our research efforts.’

It’s estimated that there are 105,200 people living with HIV in the UK, according to National AIDS Trust.

But only 94 per cent of these people are diagnosed.

This means that around 1 in 16 people living with HIV in the UK do not know that they have the virus.

International AIDS Society President Sharon Lewin said researchers hesitate to use the word ‘cure’ because it is not clear how long they need to follow up such cases.

But more than five years in remission means the man ‘would be close’ to being considered cured, she told a press conference.

There is an important difference between the man’s case and the other HIV patients who have reached long-term remission, she said.

All but one of the other patients received stem cells from donors with a rare mutation in which part of their CCR5 gene was missing, blocking HIV from entering their body’s cells.

Those donors had inherited two copies of the mutated CCR5 gene — one from each parent — making them ‘essentially immune’ to HIV, Lewin said.

But the new Berlin patient is the first to have received stem cells from a donor who had inherited only one copy of the mutated gene.

Around 15 per cent of people from European origin have one mutated copy, compared to one percent for both.

Researchers hope the latest success means there will be a much larger potential donor pool in the future.

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