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Two years ago, a 42-year-old American infected with AIDS was treated for cancer and today the virus has disappeared from his blood. Is it a fluke or a medical breakthrough?
In the 14th Century, the black plague nearly wiped out Europe. Among the survivors, a life-saving genetic trait, a mutation that prevented the deadly infection from taking over the immune system.
Now this very same mutation and a single patient are stirring new hopes for a cure to AIDS. It all happened at a hospital in Berlin, Germany. Jeff Sheehy, with the California Stem Cell Institute, says, "This is actually therapy that happened by accident because someone had leukemia, and they needed a bone marrow transplant, and their immune system got wiped out."
The American patient had both AIDS and leukemia. His doctor gave him a bone marrow transplant to treat the leukemia but selected a very special donor. The donor was born with a genetic trait that prevents HIV infection by not allowing HIV into white blood cells.
White blood cells usually have tiny receptors on their surface that act like a door, allowing HIV to attach, enter, multiply and spread infection.
With the mutation, there are no receptors, so the virus can't attach and, in that way, can't infect. Sheehy says by cutting off that receptor, the HIV can't get into the T-cell.
When the donor's bone marrow was transfused into the AIDS patient, the new cells had this special trait. More than 600 days later, doctors have found no evidence of the virus.
In a way the patient's immune system got a high-tech reboot, and that approach is getting a lot attention. "Most viruses with people are contained by the immune system, and that's what we need to do is figure out a way to engineer a person's immune system to resist HIV," says Sheehy.
Sheehy sits on the board of the California Stem Cell Institute, which is now funding research using stem cells and gene therapy to achieve a similar result.
He says, "If we do this, it opens up a way of thinking about infectious disease therapy that has been sort of inconceivable until recently."
E-mail: drkim@ksl.com
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