2024-02-15 12:09:00
After the so-called “Berlin, London, Düsseldorf and New York patients,” an HIV patient has now also been cured in Desert Springs.
Paul Edmonds from Desert Springs in the USA is 68 years old – and has been infected with the HIV virus for 30 years. Now the transplant of special stem cells has probably cured him of both leukemia and his HIV infection. The City of Hope cancer clinic in Duarte (California) said he was the oldest person to achieve this. Edmonds is only the fifth person in the world for whom combined therapy suppressed both the blood cancer and the virus.
When HIV viruses enter the body, they infect body cells. The 68-year-old had received a blood stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare gene mutation that leads to HIV-resistant cells, according to the medical team Jana Dickter by City of Hope in „New England Journal of Medicine“ (NEJM) reported. Until the treatment, Edmonds had been infected with the virus for over 30 years.
The so-called “City of Hope patient” stopped taking antiretroviral therapy against HIV almost three years ago. The case shows that it is possible to achieve success with the stem cell approach even when patients are older and after living with HIV for many years, said Dickter.
However, for the vast majority of people infected with HIV, this type of treatment is not an option because stem cell therapy is always a high-risk treatment that is only used for very seriously ill people.
Thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), most of those affected can now live well with the infection, but they have to take medication for the rest of their lives.
First cured: The Berlin patient
The first person to be cured of HIV was the so-called „Berliner Patient“ went down in history: in 1995 Timothy Ray Brown Diagnosed with HIV, he developed leukemia in 2006 and therefore needed a stem cell transplant. Doctors at the Berlin Charité found a donor who was missing the so-called CCR5 receptor – a gateway through which HIV penetrates many body cells. Brown described the date of the stem cell transplant, February 6, 2007, as his “new birth date.”
However, the leukemia later returned and Brown died from it in 2020 at the age of 54.
In the years that followed, „Londoner Patient“the “Düsseldorf patient” and the “New York patient”. All of them received the special stem cell transplant due to a parallel cancer.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 39 million people worldwide live with HIV.
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