For the fifth time, researchers have successfully cured a patient with HIV. The so-called “City of Hope patient” stopped taking antiretroviral therapy for HIV almost three years ago.
The City of Hope cancer clinic in Duarte, California, said she was the oldest person yet to achieve this.
Paul Edmonds, now 68, from Desert Springs is the fifth person in the world whose combined therapy suppressed both blood cancer and the virus.
When HIV viruses enter the body, they infect body cells. The 68-year-old had undergone a blood stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare gene mutation that leads to HIV-resistant cells, as the medical team led by Jana Dickter of City of Hope reported in the “New England Journal of Medicine” (NEJM).
Before Edmonds was treated, he had been infected with the virus for more than thirty years. However, for the vast majority of people infected with HIV, this type of treatment is not an option, because stem cell therapy is always a risky treatment that is only used in very seriously ill people.
Thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), most of those affected can now live well with the infection, but have to take medication for the rest of their lives.
Source: Krone
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