Doctors in Barcelona, Spain believe they have found the cure to HIV –
the AIDS-causing virus that affects the lives of more than 34 million
people worldwide, according to WHO.
By using blood transplants
from the umbilical cords of individuals with a genetic resistance to
HIV, Spanish medical professionals believe they can treat the virus,
having proven the procedure successful with one patient.
A
37-year-old man from Barcelona, who had been infected with the HIV virus
in 2009, was cured of the condition after receiving a transplant of
blood.
While unfortunately the man later died from cancer just
three years later, having developed lymphoma, the Spanish medical team
is still hugely encouraged by what it considers to be a breakthrough in
the fight against HIV and related conditions, according to the Spanish
news source El Mundo.
Doctors in Barcelona initially
attempted the technique using the precedent of Timothy Brown, an HIV
patient who developed leukemia before receiving experimental treatment
in Berlin, the Spanish news site The Local reported.
Brown was
given bone marrow from a donor who carried the resistance mutation from
HIV. After the cancer treatment, the HIV virus had also disappeared.
According
to The Local, the CCR5 Delta 35 mutation affects a protein in white
blood cells and provides an estimated one percent of the human
population with high resistance to infection from HIV.
Spanish
doctors attempted to treat the lymphoma of the so-called “Barcelona
patient” with chemotherapy and an auto-transplant of the cells, but were
unable to find him a suitable bone marrow.
“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
[ending] the cancer, we could also eradicate HIV,” Rafael Duarte, the
director of the Haematopoietic Transplant Programme at the Catalan
Oncology Institute in Barcelona, told The Local.
Prior to the
transplant, a patient’s blood cells are destroyed with chemotherapy
before they are replaced with new cells, incorporating the mutation
which means the HIV virus can no longer attach itself to them. For the
Barcelona patient, stem cells from another donor were used in order to
accelerate the regeneration process.
Eleven days after the
transplant, the patient in Barcelona experienced recovery. Three months
later, it was found that he was clear of the HIV virus.
Despite
the unfortunate death of the patient from cancer, the procedure has led
to the development of an ambitious project that is backed by Spain’s
National Transplant Organization.
March 2016 will mark the world’s first clinical trials of umbilical cord transplants for HIV patients with blood cancers.
Javier
Martinez, a virologist from the research foundation Irsicaixa, stressed
that the process is primarily designed to assist HIV patients suffering
from cancer, but “this therapy does allow us to speculate about a cure
for HIV,” he added.
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