HIV Patients Recover After Transplantation Of Extensive Cells, Seventh Case In Medical History

JAKARTA - For the seventh time in medical history, a patient suffering from HIV and cancer has been successfully released from the HIV virus. Like most of the previous cases, this recovery occurred after the patient received a punca cell transplant originally intended to treat cancer, not HIV.

This announcement coincides with World AIDS Day. Of course, it becomes so important because the stem cells from donors in this case were initially considered less promising than the previous case, but instead opened the hope that this method could be applied more widely.

The development of drugs that are getting better makes HIV infection no longer the death penalty like before. Patients in a country with a good health system, or able to buy medicines, can now live normally with minimal symptoms and not even felt at all.

However, they still carry the HIV virus and the risk of developing AIDS is high if drug supplies stop, as has happened to millions of people due to cuts in USAID funds.

For a small number of people, whose numbers slowly grow, HIV is now something they once had, no longer 'owned'. In the seven recorded cases, this happens because patients are also undergoing cancer treatment, especiallychaotics.

Reporting from the IFL Science page, this counterdictive-sounding phenomenon first appeared in 2008, when a man from Berlin, Germany named Timothy Ray Brown, who has lived with HIV for more than 13 years underwent two punca cell transplants for acute myeloid mireloids (AML).

Brown's luck is that the punca cell donor has a rare mutation in both copies of the gene that produces a CCR5 receptor, a protein on the surface of the immune cell that can be the entry point for HIV.

People with this mutation (called CCR5 Badminton32) have receptors smaller than the average population, making HIV viruses almost unable to enter cells. Although it is known that people with this mutation are mostly immune to HIV.

This is a fact that bone cord transplants can transmit protection. This news really shocked the medical world. Brown is still free of HIV until now.

Before anti-retroviral drugs were available, Brown's success was considered a possible revolution of treatment. But punca cell transplantation is very expensive, painful, and high risk, so drugs remain the main choice for HIV patients without cancer.

When other HIV patients needed chemotherapy and punca cell transplantation for the Hodgkin lymphoma, a donor with the CCR5 shot32 gene was found. This patient was declared cured in 2020, and since then several similar cases have been recorded.

Finding suitable punca cell donors is indeed difficult, especially if you have to have HIV resilience.

But in the latest case, the donor only brings one copy of the CCR5 SCR32 gene and one normal copy. Initially it was thought not to make a difference, because the receptor in the donor cell seemed normal indicating the CCR5 SCR32 gene was recession.

The 60-year-old was diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and began undergoing acute myeloid treatment in 2015. Six years after stopping taking anti-retroviral drugs, no HIV traces were found in his cell.

If a copy of the CCR5 SCR32 gene turns out to be enough to provide protection, the number of potential donors could increase dramatically, as more people carry one copy than two.

Although this news is encouraging, this success is not necessarily easy to repeat. He still has one copy of an ordinary gene, so the single gene doesn't prevent the initial infection.

How one copy of the gene can provide a big effect is still a mystery, and this is a big challenge in further research.

In addition to transplants with the CCR5 betterning 32, there are claims of patients recovering only with a combination of drugs, although controversial.

There was also one patient who recovered after the punca cell transplant from the donor without the CCR5 SCR32 gene showing another possible mechanism that has not been understood.

This latest study was published in the journal Nature, along with two other studies on the advancement of HIV therapy. One of them uses combinatorial immunotherapy in 10 people with HIV, seven patients managed to keep the virus low after stopping antiviral drugs. Other studies provide clues to identify factors that can make combination immunotherapy more effective in the future.