If you read any news sites out there by now you've seen the many headlines splashed across front pages proclaiming a cure for HIV. While I am the first person who would love to be able to jump up and down and shout from the rooftops, this potential cure is not actually a cure in the way you would think it would be. In this case, the patient in question was a young man who was both HIV positive and had acute myeloid leukemia. To treat his cancer, he was given extremely hard core chemotherapy and radiation to completely wipe out his immune system and in addition received a transplant of healthy stem cells. This first treatment ultimately failed and he received another round after his cancer relapsed. In this particular case, the patient received stem cells that contained a rare, inherited gene mutation conferring natural resistance to HIV infection. Although the researchers thought he would relapse, he hasn't yet so they're calling it a cure.
While there is a good chance that this patient is in fact cured of HIV, this is unfortunately not an HIV cure. The idea behind this is to eliminate every single cell containing HIV, especially the activated memory CD4(+) T cells. Doing this is extremely dangerous as no immune system means no way of fighting any infection, including HIV which is why the researches anticipated that their patient would end up free from leukemia but with AIDS. Adding stem cell transplant on top means the patient is open to a whole host of common complications including graft-versus-host disease. To have this treatment to cure HIV a patient would have to:
- Be HIV positive
- Have a cancer requiring a bone marrow transplant
- Be able to find a compatible transplant match with a rare genetic mutation found in only 1% of the Caucasian population, and at 0% in the Black population
- Have hundreds of thousands of dollars or the worlds most amazing insurance
