A 63-year-old Norwegian patient achieved HIV remission after receiving a bone marrow transplant from his brother to treat blood cancer. The case was published in Nature Microbiology and joins approximately a dozen people who have eliminated the virus through transplants.
This case joins approximately a dozen people who have achieved HIV cure or remission through bone marrow transplants, procedures primarily performed to treat aggressive blood cancers. The treatment's success is related to the CCR5 mutation, present in only one in 100 people in the region, which enables the immune system to eliminate the HIV virus.
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The patient was HIV-positive since 2006 and was diagnosed with blood cancer in 2017
The study was published in Nature Microbiology journal
The patient's brother carried a mutation called CCR5, present in one in every 100 people in the region
Two years after surgery, the patient stopped taking HIV medications and the virus was no longer detected
Dr. Anders Eivind Myhre is a team member and lead author of the study