Mexico City.- The magazine Nature revealed that a patient managed to beat HIV after a stem cell transplant. With him there are already three people with similar cases who have overcome the virus.
The first successful case was starred by Thimothy Ray Brown, from Berlin, Germany, and the second by Adam Castillejo, from London, England.
Now the so-called Düsseldorf patient, a 53-year-old man, has entered HIV remission after suffering leukemia that forced him to undergo a bone marrow transplant.
According to the article cited by El País, the donor had a mutation that prevents the virus from penetrating cells and multiplying.
In this way, the mysterious patient, whose identity was not revealed, has spent four years without antiretroviral treatment or trace of HIV.
“It is no longer an anecdote. They are three. In medicine there is nothing categorical and surprises can always occur, but here we can talk about a case of cure”, published the researcher Javier Martínez-Picado.
However, the specialist insists that the virus, today, is incurable, but it can be controlled, although if the medication is suspended it replicates in the body.
“HIV has three curses: it destroys the immune system, it integrates into our cells and it mutates very quickly,” he laments.
This, in the words of the researcher, makes its elimination difficult because. Either it strikes down the immune cells that have the function of protecting us from external pathogens, or it hides in them.
“In a kind of state of latency in the so-called viral reservoirs, which prevent it from being destroyed. Its great variability also complicates the search for an effective vaccine for all the circulating variants, ”he details.
Even with all this, the third patient who defeated the virus is a great scientific milestone because it opens a window towards new research strategies, the Spanish media wrote.
“This article has three virtues: it has cured a person, it allows us to maintain confidence and hope that we can cure patients with HIV, and it allows us to establish the bases to make this scalable,” concluded Martínez-Picado.
