a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS

[jason]

A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS - WSJ.com

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

Dr. Gero Hütter isnt an AIDS specialist, but he functionally cured a patient, who shows no sign of the disease. “I was very surprised,” said the doctor, Gero Hütter.

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isnt an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patients bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

[via Slashdot | German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant]

Comments

[moons-mistress.livejournal.com]

This is so fascinating but at the same time, to have such a drastic step taken by people living with HIV/AIDS to see whether it would work for them ... Especially if they don't have leukemia ... It seems like a drastic step that could harm more than help. I wonder how scientists would be able to test this theory without using human volunteers?

And did you see the article in the Star about how old HIV/AIDS seems to be? It's rather unsettling to know that they've been able to track it back almost a hundred years and yet nobody really knew about it until it started effecting North American populations. http://www.thestar.com/article/509769