HIV

HIV

For more than 3 decades HIV, has been termed as most deadly disease, as medically no cure has been found where you can say that this cure is definitely going to work for HIV patients.

For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with HIV, the virus that causes Aids.

The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate.

The surprise success now confirms that a cure for HIV infection is possible, if difficult, researchers said.

Publicly, the scientists are describing the case as a long-term “remission.”

Remission in medical term is known as a period during which a serious illness improves for some time and patient improves. In interviews, most experts are calling it a cure, with the caveat that it is hard to know how to define the word when there are only two known instances.

Both milestones resulted from bone-marrow transplants given to infected patients. But the transplants were intended to treat cancer in the patients, not HIV. This will definitely inspire that cure is not a dream, and it is reachable.

A consortium of European scientists studying stem cell transplants to treat HIV infection. The consortium is supported by , the American Aids research  organisation.

This patient has chosen to remain anonymous, and is being referred as a ‘London Patient’.to help the Doctors understand how it happened so they can develop the science further.’

A German patient in 2007, was cured in this way earlier, and in medical history he came to be known as ‘Berlin Patient’, who was later identifies as Timothy Ray brown, now 52 years of age, who lives now in California.

Once it became clear that Brown was cured, scientists set out to duplicate

his result with other cancer patients infected with HIV.In case after case, the virus came roaring back, often around nine months after the patients stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, or else the patients died of cancer.

BROWN CURE

The failures left scientists wondering whether Brown’s cure would remain a fluke.

Brown had leukemia, and after chemotherapy failed to stop it, needed two bone-marrow transplants.

The transplants were from a donor with a mutation in a protein called CCR5, which rests on the surface of certain immune cells. HIV uses the protein to enter those cells but cannot latch on to the mutated version.

Brown was given harsh immunosuppressive drugs of a kind that are no longer used, and suffered intense complications for months after the transplant.

The London Patient had Hodgkin lymphoma and received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor with the CCR5 mutation in May 2016.

He, too, received immunosuppressive drugs, but the treatment was much less intense, in line with current standards for transplant patients.

He quit taking anti-HIV drugs in September 2017, making him the first patient since Brown known to remain virus-free for more than a year after stopping.

So far, its scientists are tracking 38 HIV-infected people who have received bone-marrow transplants, including six from donors without the mutation.

None of this guarantees that the London patient is forever out of the woods, but the similarities to Brown’s recovery offer reason for optimism.

Brown, the Berlin Patient, says he is hopeful that the London Patient’s cure proves as durable as his own. ‘If something has happened once in medical science, it can happen again,” Brown said. “I’ve been waiting for company for a long time.’

So Let us hope for the best.

Waiting for your views/feed backs/comments.

Anil Malik

Mumbai, India

6^th Mar 2019