Fifth Person Cured of HIV In Major Breakthrough!

March 2, 2023
TOMMY

In what is being called a triumph of modern medical Science, another person has been cured of HIV following revolutionary stem cell treatments. The 53-year-old man from Germany is known only as "the Dusseldorf Patient" so as to maintain their anonymity. He is now the 5th person to be fully cured of a disease that has plagued our community for almost half a century.

The Dusseldorf patient, like the four success stories before him, went into the stem cell treatments in the hopes of curing his blood cancer. In each case, the patient's stem cell donors had an HIV-resistant mutation that eradicates a protein called CCR5, which HIV uses to enter the cell. This mutation is only found in 1% of the world's population.

Before the Dusseldorf Patient, there were four patients fully cured of HIV through this procedure. The first was Timothy Ray Brown, then known only as the Berlin Patient, who was cured of HIV by stem cell transplant in 2009. Following Brown was the London Patient, whose case was published in 2019, and then The City of Hope and New York Patients, which were both published in 2022.

And unlike certain long-term treatments that essentially act like a cure, but are really just exceptional long-term management processes, this is literally a cure. "It’s really cured, and not just, you know, long-term remission," said Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen. Ole Jensen is one of the researchers who published the Dusseldorf Patient in the Science journal "Nature Medicine."

Though an incredible feat of Science, stem cell transplants remain an incredibly risky procedure. Put simply, a stem cell transplant essentially completely replaces a person's entire immune system. There are currently around 38.4 million people living with HIV around the world. Thankfully, medications like Descovy and Truvada have helped usher in a new era of protection for the world, most notably for gay men. There are also numerous research studies currently in the works that are close to discovering a full vaccination for HIV.