German doctors say another person declared free of HIV after blood stem cell transplant

Feb. 20 (UPI) -- Researchers at Dusseldorf University said Monday a fifth person has been declared free of HIV after a blood stem cell transplant during that patient's treatment for leukemia.

The revelation, disclosed in a study published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, said the patient, a 53-year-old man from Dusseldorf, Germany, tested positive for HIV in 2008 and developed leukemia three years later.

Doctors treated the cancer with chemotherapy, but it returned in 2013, leading to the risky blood stem cell treatment after doctors learned the cancer treatment killed off the man's immune cells.

Researchers said that, like previous success stories with individuals in London and Berlin, the donor had a rare mutation that resists certain strains of HIV. Doctors said donor's mutation disabled the CCR5 receptor that HIV uses to infect immune cells.

"We don't think there's a functional virus present," Bjorn Jensen at Düsseldorf University Hospital told the German publication DW.

Researchers said that they stopped giving the patient immunosuppression drugs in 2017 to prevent rejection of the donor cells and, in November 2018, they stopped antiretroviral treatment.

Blood stem cell transplants remain risky and are only performed under extreme circumstances with cancer patients who have run out of more-traditional options.

HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, destroys the cells of the immune system and can lead to AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, where a person cannot fight even a routine infection.

Today, modern medications can keep the virus from progressing in 38.4 million who currently have HIV.