Researchers in Spain say results are hopeful in the battle against HIV, after a patient was ‘cured’ in just three months.
The 37-year-old man from Barcelona was ruled virus free after receiving a blood transplant from the umbilical cord of people with a genetic resistance to the virus.
The man, who had been diagnosed in 2009, later died of cancer after he developed lymphoma in 2012. The medical researchers in Spain still believe the HIV treatment represents a breakthrough in the quest to cure the disease, Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported.
The Barcelona team developed their treatment based on the case of Timothy Brown, a HIV patient in Berlin who received experimental treatment when he was suffering from leukaemia.
Mr Brown received a bone marrow donation from a person with the CCR5 Delta 35 mutation – a naturally occurring trait which gives approximately one per cent of the human population a high resistance to HIV.
In the Barcelona case, doctors were unable to find a match for a potential bone-marrow transplant, so they turned to another source.
"We suggested a transplant of blood from an umbilical cord but from someone who had the mutation because we knew from 'the Berlin patient' that as well as treating the cancer, we could also eradicate HIV," explained Rafael Duarte of the Catalan Oncology Institute in Barcelona.
This treatment works by destroying a patient’s blood cells with chemotherapy, and replacing them with new ones. The donor stem cells’ immunity becomes part of the patient’s innate defences, meaning the HIV virus can no longer attach itself.
Three months after his transplant, the Barcelona patient was found to be free of the HIV virus.
The process is now receiving the backing of Spain’s National Transplant Organisation, and the first clinical trials of umbilical cord blood transplants will start in March 2015.
The researchers stressed that for the moment, the treatment is designed for HIV patients suffering from cancer, but that it “does allow us to speculate about a cure for HIV.”
