A German doctor claims to have cured HIV in a patient by giving him a bone marrow transplant
Great news 
edit: full article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/he...ransplant.html
The man, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, has shown no trace of the virus in the nearly two years since Dr Gero Huetter, a haematologist, gave him the operation - a standard treatment for leukaemia, from which the patient was also suffering.
The breakthrough gives hope for cutting-edge gene therapies to tackle the disease that killed 2 million people worldwide last year and infected another 2.7 million.
Working on a hunch, Dr Huetter selected a bone marrow donor who had a genetic resistance to most strains of HIV in the hope that the transplanted marrow would produce HIV-resistant cells in his patient.
It appears to have worked, and yesterday Dr Huetter declared his patient ''functionally cured''.
The patient has taken no anti-retroviral drugs, the standard treatment for AIDS, since the transplant.
"HIV has an Achilles heel,'' Dr Huetter told a press conference in Berlin.
People with the genetic resistance have a mutation which blocks the production of the molecule, giving carriers a life-long resistance to most strains of HIV.
About 1 per cent of Europeans have the mutation, but people of African, Asian and South American descent almost never carry it.
Though bone marrow transplants are not an effective therapy, since they are expensive and kill up to 30 per cent of recipients, it offers hope that AIDS patients' cells could be re-engineered using gene therapy
The breakthrough gives hope for cutting-edge gene therapies to tackle the disease that killed 2 million people worldwide last year and infected another 2.7 million.
Working on a hunch, Dr Huetter selected a bone marrow donor who had a genetic resistance to most strains of HIV in the hope that the transplanted marrow would produce HIV-resistant cells in his patient.
It appears to have worked, and yesterday Dr Huetter declared his patient ''functionally cured''.
The patient has taken no anti-retroviral drugs, the standard treatment for AIDS, since the transplant.
"HIV has an Achilles heel,'' Dr Huetter told a press conference in Berlin.
People with the genetic resistance have a mutation which blocks the production of the molecule, giving carriers a life-long resistance to most strains of HIV.
About 1 per cent of Europeans have the mutation, but people of African, Asian and South American descent almost never carry it.
Though bone marrow transplants are not an effective therapy, since they are expensive and kill up to 30 per cent of recipients, it offers hope that AIDS patients' cells could be re-engineered using gene therapy
edit: full article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/he...ransplant.html
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