HIV 'Cure' Fails In First 2 Patients

[Jesus Malverde]

Sad news from the front of the fight against AIDS: Two HIV-positive people who underwent bone marrow transplants and were thought to be functionally cured have tested positive for the virus again.

HIV virus lives in and kills white blood cells. These blood cells are created in the bone marrow, so researchers were hopeful that they could cure the disease by wiping out the infected patient's bone marrow and replacing it with donor marrow that wasn't infected with the virus. This is a procedure frequently performed to treat blood cancers, so doctors are pretty comfortable with the risks, though complications can be lethal.

Two patients from Boston got bone marrow transplants to treat their blood cancer three and five years earlier. After the procedure, they were kept on drugs, and the doctors have been monitoring their blood virus levels ever since. In 2012 they announced their first results, that the patients were still free of the HIV virus years after the transplant.

To really test the "cure" though, the patients were taken off anti-HIV drugs.

Bad news struck just months after they were taken off the drugs: The virus came back. The virus was either at too low of a level to be detected while the patients were on drugs, or it could have been hiding out somewhere other than blood cells (where they normally look) in a dormant state that couldn't be detected.

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/HIV-Cure-Fails-In-First-2-Patients-5042391.php

[Fearless]

1. Weren't they supposed to use marrow from someone with the gene sequence

Making them immune to the HIV virus? There was promise several years back regarding the Delta32 mutation. The mutation itself makes it statistically improbable that HIV can penetrate the body's T-cells because it keeps the CCR5 protein from coming to the cell's surface and allowing HIV to latch onto it. A transplant from a person who had such a mutation was assumed to eventually eliminate the virus carrying cells from the body, replacing them with virus-immune white blood cells. The article talks about the person this was done to in the past. I wonder why they equate this different, incomparable study with the actual promising example involving the Delta32 mutation.

[closeupready]

2. A disappointing setback, but we're going to get there. Progress

continues to be made at better meds, and people are living longer. Hopefully, we'll get there soon.