Ten years after the ‘Berlin patient,’ doctors announce a second person has been effectively ‘cured’ of HIV
By Kate Sheridan,
STAT
| 03. 04. 2019
For the second time, doctors appear to have put HIV into “sustained remission” with a stem cell transplant — effectively curing the recipient.
Their work, which was published in Nature and will be presented at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle on Tuesday, may encourage scientists working on new gene therapies based on similar principles and give hope to those living with the infection.
The case comes nearly 10 years after Timothy Ray Brown announced he was the so-called “Berlin Patient” — the first person who was functionally cured of HIV and able to stop taking antiretroviral drugs after an intensive round of chemotherapy and radiation and two bone marrow transplants.
The person who received this latest transplant in London has not taken antiretroviral drugs since September 2017; he is not identified in the paper.
“Those of us in the field have been waiting for a second cure via this approach,” said Dr. Keith Jerome, one of the leaders of HIV cure research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “As long as Timothy Brown was...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...