A HIV-positive patient, called the “London Patient”, has experienced sustained remission from HIV-1 infection after stem-cell transplantation becoming only the second person in the world to achieve this, as reported in the journal Nature. The patient with HIV-1 infection was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2012. To treat the cancer, the patient received a transplant of hematopoietic stem cells from a donor with two copies of the CCR5 Δ32 (delta 32) allele. The patient experienced only a mild reaction to the stem-cell transplant.
The patient became homozygous for CCR5 Δ32 after transplantation, and anti-retroviral therapy was interrupted after 16 months. The authors confirmed that HIV-1 RNA was undetectable, and the patient has so far been in remission for 18 months. The first historic case to achieve remission was a patient named Timothy Brown, known as the ‘Berlin…
