How was the Berlin patient cured of HIV?
The Berlin patient was 40 years old when he developed leukemia. He had been infected with HIV for more than 10 years, but he was keeping his infection under control with a standard HIV drug regimen. Standard treatment for leukemia is to kill off most of a patient’s blood cells with chemotherapy — a process called conditioning — and then to rescue the patient with infusions of stem cells from a matched donor’s blood or bone marrow. The new stem cells then repopulate the immune system and kill off the leukemia cells that survived the conditioning treatment. The patient’s doctor, Gero Hütter, MD, had an idea. Since HIV hides in white blood cells, why not try to cure the patient of leukemia and HIV at the same time? Instead of a normal donor, Huetter looked for a donor who carried the relatively rare mutation called CCR5delta32. People with this mutation lack functional CCR5, the keyhole that HIV most often uses to enter cells. People who inherit two copies of this gene are highly resist
