‘Dusseldorf Patient’ Cured of HIV Following Stem Cell Transplant

A 53-year-old German man appears to be cured of HIV following a stem cell transplant, a team of doctors from Dusseldorf University Hospital reported last week in Nature Medicine. The so-called “Dusseldorf Patient” is one of three patients worldwide to be cured of HIV via stem cell transplantation.

Six months after starting antiretroviral therapy (ART), the patient was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In 2013, he received a stem cell transplantation that aimed to treat both AML and HIV. The donor stem cells exhibited a rare mutation in the CCR5 gene (CCR5Delta32 mutation), most commonly found in central and northern Europe. The mutation results in the absence of a docking site for HIV in immune cells, which may protect against infection with HIV.

Following the stem cell transplant, the treatment team conducted extensive tests (detailed in the Nature Medicine report) to establish whether evidence of replication-capable HIV could be found. In 2018, after four years of planning and monitoring by the treatment team, the patient ended ART. There was no rebound of plasma HIV-1 in the absence of ART, and the patient remains in good health today.

The treatment team conducted a detailed virological and immunological analysis of the patient’s blood and tissue that they hope will provide starting points for planning future studies into cures for HIV.

“Following our intensive research, we can now confirm that it is fundamentally possible to prevent the replication of HIV on a sustainable basis by combining two key methods,” said lead author Björn Jensen, MD, said in a media statement. “On the one hand, we have the extensive depletion of the virus reservoir in long-lived immune cells, and on the other hand, the transfer of HIV resistance from the donor immune system to the recipient, ensuring that the virus has no chance to spread again. Further research is now needed into how this can be made possible outside the narrow set of framework conditions we have described.”