German scientists have cured a person of AIDS for the first time in the world: the corresponding article has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. However, this work is unlikely to be a harbinger of a method to cure people from AIDS
The work of scientists was published in the December issue of the scientific journal Blood and on the website of this publication. In the article, employees of the renowned Berlin Medical University "Charite", headed by Gero Hutter, talk about how the operation was performed on a 44-year-old US citizen Timothy Ray Brown, who was ill with leukemia and AIDS.
The operation consisted of bone marrow transplantation. This procedure is directed against the development of leukemia and is now a transplantation of pre-harvested hematopoietic stem cells. In order for this operation to have a positive effect on the treatment of AIDS, doctors took material for transplantation from donors who inherited such a gene mutation that leaves cells without receptors involved in HIV infection.
In the journal Blood, doctors report that three and a half years after the transplant, Brown is HIV-free.
“Our results strongly indicate that the patient was HIV free,” the authors of the article write. In addition, Brown's body shows no signs of leukemia.
After the publication of this article, the scientific community began to comment on it violently.
“This is an interesting test of the concept that with fairly extreme measures the patient can be free of HIV. But this is too risky a technique for a standard therapy to be created on its basis. Even if matching donors are found,” PhysOrg quotes Michael Saag of the University of Alabama, former chairman of the Medical Association for HIV Treatment.
Saag says that the mortality rate for such procedures "is five percent or more," since they literally destroy the person's native immune system.
In fact, the doctors decided on this procedure, because in Brown's case they had nowhere to retreat, since the patient was bad.
"I would call it a functional treatment," says Dr. Margaret Fish, one of the pioneers of HIV research at the University of Miami, quoted by The Gazzette in Canada. - This is a very remarkable case. But will we do such a procedure for HIV patients? Not".
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Fish explains his negative answer by the fact that this method of treatment is "too radical" for general use. However, this opens up new avenues for researchers to develop more effective, practical treatments for AIDS.
Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with CNN that such treatment "is inappropriate."
“It's hard enough to get good transplant compatibility like this.
You have to find a donor who has a certain genetic defect, and it is found in only 1 percent of representatives of the Caucasian (in other words - Caucasian or Eurasian - note "Gazeta. Ru") race and zero percent of the black race, "Fauci recalled.