Man who underwent bone marrow transplant appears to be cured of AIDS

[J-man]

A 42 year old American living in Berlin might have been cured of AIDS after he underwent a bone marrow transplant, as part of therapy against leukemia.
He received bone marrow from a donor who had a mutation that prevents a molecule called 'CCR5' from appearing on the surface of cells.

Most HIV strains use CCR5 to enter the cell. About 1% of the Europeans have this mutation. The bone marrow with out the CCR5 was specially selected. Bone marrow produces white blood cells, cells which HIV infects.

source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122602394113507555.html

Do you think this might be a leap forward in an attempt to cure AIDS, or find a vaccine for it?

 

[mrtn]

That's great news.

 

[uppi]

Do you think this might be a leap forward in an attempt to cure AIDS, or find a vaccine for it?

I'd say this already seems to be a "cure" for AIDS, if only for a very tiny minority. Any larger scale application would need a procedure, that 30% of patients don't survive. And besides that, it requires changing the genome of the blood cells, and that would open another can of worms.

A vaccine based on this is totally out of the question. Does anybody really want to experiment with the genome of the whole population?

And:

Most HIV strains use CCR5 to enter the cell.

This implies that there are strains that don't use CCR5. If this becomes widespread, HIV might out-evolve the countermeasures yet again.

But I imagine that man is quite happy now: Who can say about himself that he survived AIDS and cancer?

 

[Ammar]

But I imagine that man is quite happy now: Who can say about himself that he survived AIDS and cancer?

Well, he hasn't survived either so far.

 

[Brighteye]

HIV also uses another receptor. It readily mutates to use CXCR4 if it doesn't already. This is not a cure.
The only cure is to eliminate all T cells in the body and then replace them with a transplant. This is not feasible.

 

[Onionsoilder]

Some descendants of survivors of the Bubonic Plague are immune to HIV. The Plague also infected and destroyed T-4 Cells before attacking the rest of the body(which is what made it so deadly). I wonder if this mutation is related to that?

 

[GoodGame]

Do you think this might be a leap forward in an attempt to cure AIDS, or find a vaccine for it?

Possibly. I recall the small percentage of the public that is CCR5 negative are immune to HIV, something like 10% of all Europeans. A quick read finds some drug companies are trying to find ways to suppress the gene's product as an AIDS treatment: 'entry inhibitors'.



@OnionSoldier, I've heard that there's claim of a link to Bubonic plague and CCR5 population frequency: e.g. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=299980 I take it that has not been proven conclusively.