An adult man dubbed “The Next Berlin Patient” has been declared the seventh person to be cured of HIV, and his case provides valuable information that could lead to a more broadly accessible approach for the 39 million people living with the virus around the globe.
Immunologist Christian Gaebler, M.D., M.Sc., of Charité – Berlin University Medicine, will present the new case at the 25th International AIDS conference in Munich, which runs from July 22 to 26.
In a press preview on Thursday, Gaebler described how the patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and then later developed acute myeloid leukemia. In 2015, the clinical team decided the patient needed a hematopoietic stem cell transplant in his bone marrow to treat his cancer. The team “began searching for donors with this rare genetic mutation known as the homozygous delta-32 CCR5 mutation, because we know that this mutation provides natural resistance to HIV,” Gaebler explained.
“The patient discontinued his recommended antiviral treatment on his own in 2018 and since then, the patient is in treatment-free HIV remission,” Gaebler said. For almost six years they’ve tested his blood and other tissues and found no signs of the virus.
Of the six other known individuals cured of HIV, five of them had received donated cells from someone homozygous for the delta-32 mutation, meaning that after the transplant they had no functional CCR5 receptor for the virus to bind to. The one exception is the sixth case, “The Geneva Patient,” whose donated cells had no delta-32 mutations at all; for them, wiping out the infected white blood cells seems to have gotten rid of the virus, and it hasn’t returned even though the patient has receptors HIV could use to infect cells.
