Immunity Gene ‘Cures’ Bay Area Man Of AIDS

Source

(AP)

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) — A 45-year-old man now living in the Bay Area may be the first person ever cured of the deadly disease AIDS, the result of the discovery of an apparent HIV immunity gene.

Timothy Ray Brown tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but has now entered scientific journals as the first man in world history to have that HIV virus completely eliminated from his body in what doctors call a “functional cure.”

Brown was living in Berlin, Germany back in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant that had astounding results.

“I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since,” said Brown, who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community.

Brown’s amazing progress continues to be monitored by doctors at San Francisco General Hospital and at the University of California at San Francisco medical center.

“I’m cured of HIV. I had HIV but I don’t anymore,” he said, using words that many in the scientific community are cautiously clinging to.

Scientists said Brown received stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV. In fact, about one percent of Caucasians are immune to HIV. Some researchers think the immunity gene goes back to the Great Plague: people who survived the plague passed their immunity down and their heirs have it today.

UCSF’s Dr. Jay Levy, who co-discovered the HIV virus and is one of the most respected AIDS researchers in the world, said this case opens the door to the field of “cure research,” which is now gaining more attention.

“If you’re able to take the white cells from someone and manipulate them so they’re no longer infected, or infectable, no longer infectable by HIV, and those white cells become the whole immune system of that individual, you’ve got essentially a functional cure,” he explained.

UCSF’s Dr. Paul Volberding, another pioneering AIDS expert who has studied the disease for all of its 30 years cautioned that while “the Berlin Patient is a fascinating story, it’s not one that can be generalized.”

Both doctors stressed that Brown’s radical procedure may not be applicable to many other people with HIV, because of the difficulty in doing stem cell transplants, and finding the right donor.

“You don’t want to go out and get a bone marrow transplant because transplants themselves carry a real risk of mortality,” Volberding said.

He explained that scientists also still have many unanswered questions involving the success of Brown’s treatment.

“One element of his treatment, and we don’t know which, allowed apparently the virus to be purged from his body,” he observed. “So it’s going to be an interesting, I think productive area to study.”

Volberding continued, “Knock on wood, (Brown) hasn’t had any recurrence now for several years of the virus, and that hasn’t happened before in our experience.”

As a result, at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation some are now using the word “cure” after so many avoided it for decades.

“You sort of felt like you couldn’t say ‘cure’ for a number of years. Scientists and clinicians and people with HIV alike felt that was a promise that was never going to be realized and it was dangerous to direct a lot of energy toward it,” said Dr. Judy Auerbach. “And now things have shifted.”

The California Institute of Regenerative Medicine is currently funding stem cell research in the Bay Area based on Brown’s case in the hopes of replicating his success for broader populations of people with HIV.

The institute said it plans to begin clinical trials next year.

Man Officially Cured of HIV

Source

For the first time, a man has been declared officially cured of HIV. The remedy may nearly have killed him, but it opens a door—just a crack—to hope that we may someday kill off the scourge for good.

Strangely enough, the diagnosis that most concerned Timothy Ray Brown in 2007 was acute myeloid leukemia. HIV has been increasingly thought of as a manageable disease, though certainly a terribly burdensome one. What brought the 42-year old Brown under the care of Germany's Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin hospital was the more immediate threat his cancer posed.

The treatment Brown underwent was aggressive: chemotherapy that destroyed the majority of his immune cells. Total body irradiation. Finally, a risky stem-cell transplant that nearly a third of patients don't survive—but that appears to have completely cured Brown of HIV.

Doctors were savvy when they chose a stem cell donor for Brown. The man whose bone marrow they used has a particular genetic mutation, present in an incredibly small percentage of people, that makes him almost invulnerable to HIV. With Brown's own defenses decimated by treatments, the healthy, HIV-resistant donor cells repopulated his immune system. The initial indications that the virus had abated were promising. But only just now, having taken no antiretroviral drugs since the transplant, and following extensive testing shows no signs whatsoever of HIV, have his doctors given the official word:

He's cured.

What does this mean for the future of treatment? It's not as though every HIV patient can or would want to go through the tremendous suffering that was prelude to Brown's recovery, or be able to afford the procedure if they could or did. But for the first time, we know that HIV can be cured, not just managed. It opens new avenues of research—gene therapy, stem cell treatments—that may otherwise have been thought dead ends. [AIDS Map]

HIV Cured by Immune System Stimulation

International activists are lashing out at world leaders for failing in their promises to do more to treat people with HIV. The criticism comes during the AIDS conference which is underway in Vienna, calling for an end to 'treatment discrimination'. Dr Marco Ruggiero, from the University of Florence in Italy, supports the view that the public has been misinformed about HIV.

Now, maybe these are the alternate "quacks". Well the scientist who discovered HIV agrees with them