In an exciting new development, a second patient has been declared cured of HIV after receiving stem cell transplant. Doctors said that the patient, known as “The London Patient” had shown no trace of infection 30 months after he stopped traditional treatment.

The patient, 40-year-old Adam Castillejo from Venezuela, was first diagnosed with HIV in 2003. He had been receiving HIV medication until 2012, when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a dangerous form of cancer.

Adam received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in 2016. The stem cells that he received came from donors with a rare genetic mutation that prevents HIV from taking hold.

He originally made headlines last year after researchers from the University of Cambridge reported that they hadn’t found any traces of HIV in his system for 18 months.

The details of his journey were recently published in the journal The Lancet HIV. The researchers declared the latest test results to be “even more remarkable” as they demonstrate that the patient is almost certainly cured of HIV.

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Lead author Ravindra Gupta said of the remarkable findings: “We’ve tested a sizeable set of sites that HIV likes to hide in and they are all pretty much negative for an active virus.”

Adam is the second patient to have been cured of HIV in this way. The first was an American named Timothy Brown, who was known as the “Berlin patient”. Brown recovered from HIV in 2011 after receiving the same type of stem cell transplant.

The researchers tested Adam’s cerebral fluid, intestinal tissue and lymphoid tissue to confirm that his infection was gone. Although the researchers found fragments of the HIV virus, they were incapable of reproducing, which made them impotent.

This remarkable breakthrough suggests that this stem cell cure for HIV is effective and can be replicated.

Source: Second patient cured of HIV using stem cell transplant treatment

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