London man is second patient to be free of HIV after transplant

A LONDON man appears to be free of the AIDS virus after a stem-cell transplant, the second success after the 'Berlin patient', doctors reported.

The therapy had an early success with Timothy Ray Brown, a US man treated in Germany who is 12 years post-transplant and still free of HIV. Until now, Brown is the only person thought to have been cured of infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Such transplants are dangerous and have failed in other patients. They're also impractical to try to cure the millions already infected.

The latest case “shows the cure of Timothy Brown was not a fluke and can be recreated”, said Dr Keith Jerome of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who had no role. He added that it could lead to a simpler approach that could be used more widely.

The case was published online on Monday by the journal Nature and will be presented at an HIV conference in Seattle.

The patient has not been identified. He was diagnosed with HIV in 2003 and started taking drugs to control the infection in 2012. It's unclear why he waited that long. He developed Hodgkin lymphoma that year and agreed to a stem-cell transplant to treat the cancer in 2016.

With the right kind of donor, his doctors figured, the London patient might get a bonus beyond treating his cancer: a possible HIV cure.

Doctors found a donor with a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV. About one per cent of people descended from northern Europeans have inherited the mutation from both parents and are immune to most HIV. The donor had this double copy of the mutation.

That was “an improbable event”, said lead researcher Ravindra Gupta of University College London.“That's why this has not been observed more frequently.”

The transplant changed the London patient's immune system, giving him the donor's mutation and HIV resistance.

The patient voluntarily stopped taking HIV drugs to see if the virus would come back.

Usually, HIV patients expect to stay on daily pills for life to suppress the virus. When drugs are stopped, the virus roars back, usually in two to three weeks.

That didn't happen with the London patient. There is still no trace of the virus after 18 months off the drugs.

AP Timothy Ray Brown poses for a photograph, Monday, March 4, 2019, in Seattle. Brown, also known as the ‘Berlin patient’, was the first person to be cured of HIV infection, more than a decade ago. Now researchers are reporting a second patient has lived 18 months after stopping HIV treatment following a stem-cell transplant.