A 53-year-old man from Germany was completely cured of his HIV infection following a stem cell transplant in 2014, the fifth such case reported worldwide. About it informs scientific journal Nature Medicine, which published a study on the treatment of a patient.
According to the researchers, at the moment, no traces of HIV infection have been found in the analyzes of the man, who is called the “Düsseldorf patient” in the report. He stopped taking medication for the disease in 2019. The patient’s doctor, Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen, said that despite the fact that the man showed no signs of active HIV disease in 2019, he was in no hurry to declare that the virus was “in remission” even then. According to Jensen, the virus is now “really cured” and not in “long remission.”
“I think we can get a lot of information from this patient’s treatment history and similar HIV cures,” commented Jensen.
Po estimated According to the UN for 2021, 38.4 million people are now infected with HIV worldwide. Of these, 36.7 million people are adults, and 1.7 million are children under the age of 15 years. The first person to be cured of HIV infection was Timothy Ray Brown, whom researchers called the “Berlin patient” in treatment results published in 2009. Subsequently, scientists announced three more cases of cure for the virus. All patients underwent stem cell transplantation for the treatment of blood cancer. Their donors had a mutation that provides resistance to HIV infection – only 1% of the world’s population has it.