In 2008, German doctors reported they had used a selective adult stem cell transplant to treat a leukemia patient. The treatment had a side effect — that the transplant also removed his HIV infection.
After the transplant, the virus was undetectable in his bloodstream for at least two years and he no longer took antiretroviral drugs.
Now, doctors have reveale the name of the patient — Timothy Ray Brown, an HIV-positive man — and they are claiming the results with this patient provide evidence for a “cure” for HIV infection using the selective adult stem cell transplant.
HIV Positive Man Cured
Publishing their results in the medical journal Blood, they say, “In conclusion, our results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.”
The transplant appeared to wipe out both diseases, but Dr. David Prentice, a former biology professor at Indiana State University who is a fellow at the Family Research Council, told LifeNews.com that caution is in order.
“The evidence at the time, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was compelling,” he told LifeNews.com this afternoon. “The adult stem cell transplant, a standard treatment for leukemia, selectively used donor cells that lacked a molecule called CCR5–this cell-surface protein acts as an attachment factor for the HIV virus, so the donor cells were resistant to HIV infection. But the HIV virus can hide in various cells and re-infect a patient’s system.”
HIV Positive Man Cured
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