A Toronto patient who has been living with HIV for 27 years is in remission – and potentially cured, according to his doctors – after a bone marrow transplant from a donor naturally resistant to the virus.

If he remains in remission for about two and a half years, the 36-year-old will join 10 people in the world currently considered cured of HIV.

The patient was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia in November 2021 and needed a bone marrow transplant. His medical team of clinicians at the University Health Network, Unity Health Toronto and the University of Toronto say they saw an opportunity to cure his HIV at the same time, a feat first accomplished in Berlin in 2007, by finding a donor match with a genetic mutation resistant to the virus.

"We feel pretty confident that it's gone, but it's hard for us to say for absolute sure right now that he is cured," said Dr. Sharon Walmsley, director of the HIV Clinic at Toronto General Hospital.

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[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago

This is how it works (from the article) ...

The search began to find the best bone marrow match. The ideal donor would also have a CCR5 gene mutation resistant to HIV.

CCR5 is a protein on the surface of an immune cell that acts as the door that HIV enters to infect the body, but about one per cent of the population, primarily of northern European descent, are deficient of this gene.

That means there is no door for the virus to enter, “and so the virus can't get into the cells,” said Dr. Mario Ostrowski, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital who co-led the case with Walmsley. The new donor cells could also attack and eliminate the reservoir of virus-infected cells.