A Seventh Person Has Most Likely Been Cured of HIV Following Stem Cell Transplant – Them

A German man is reportedly the seventh person in history to be cured of HIV, according to researchers who will present the information at the 2024 International AIDS Conference in Munich, Germany.

Multiple tests given to the German man were unable to detect any copies of the virus in his body following a stem cell transplant for acute myeloid leukemia that occurred in 2015, according to a report in NBC News. The man stopped taking antiretroviral medication for his HIV in 2018 and remains in remission, or a state of having no virus present in the body.

The man has chosen to remain anonymous, but did issue a statement about his medical condition. A healthy person has many wishes, he said, a sick person only one.

The longer we see these HIV remissions without any HIV therapy, the more confidence we can get that were probably seeing a case where we really have eradicated all competent HIV, Dr. Christian Gaebler, a physician and scientist at the Charit-Universittsmedizin Berlin, told NBC News.

While any cure news is always welcomed both in the HIV community and to those outside it, the German mans case is emblematic of a trend that is proving hard to replicate for the 39 million people living with HIV worldwide. In each of the seven cases, according to NBC News, the cure came as the result of stem cell treatments for people living with HIV who had developed blood cancer. Such stem cell transplants are toxic and can be fatal, as NBC News, making it unethical as a treatment for the overwhelming majority of people with HIV.

When HIV enters a persons body, it functionally turns a persons immune cells into factories that make more and more copies of the virus. However, existing alongside these copies of the virus that actively attack a persons immune system is the latent HIV reservoir, a group of immune cells that have been overtaken by HIV but are not currently reproducing new copies of the virus. These dormant cells can awaken at any time, and targeting these cells is a major problem for HIV cure researchers. Often, these reservoirs are located in hard-to-reach areas, including the lymph nodes, the gut, and the brain, according to The Body, an HIV/AIDS news and information site.

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A Seventh Person Has Most Likely Been Cured of HIV Following Stem Cell Transplant - Them